End cow? Fund cave? Food core? We all sat round trying to work out what was written next to my name on the office whiteboard, my task for the week. Wait, I remember: 'Find love'. That's it. I have to find love in a videogame.
This actually makes sense. Not many girls play videogames, which makes them an incredibly efficient social filter: you instantly cut out the majority of girls who have little interest in games and would only get sick of you talking about them all the time.
Finding love is probably a bit strong - really the short term objective is to meet interesting, single people of the appropriate gender and age. What happens from there is probably too personal to generalise about.
EVE Online Naturally the first place I thought to look was space. Space has everything in it. But EVE Online might be a challenge - its developers themselves admit "women don't want to be spaceships". I don't know about you, but I don't think I could love a woman who didn't, just a little bit, somewhere deep down, want to be a spaceship.
Since my existing EVE characters were all startlingly attractive women, and that might attract the wrong crowd, I decided to create a new one. I chose a Gallente, since they're broadly the most fetching of EVE's bloodlines. An Activist's ancestry, for a boost to my Charisma stat, and a Military Spec-Ops profession, to appear manly yet mysterious.
Designing my character's look was trickier: EVE's character creation tool is sumptuous, but the outfits, backdrops and faces on offer are geared more towards camp, mass-murdering plexiglass fetishists than chisel-jawed studs. Early on I decided to veto any backdrops involving skulls. No hairstyles involving translucent plastic restraints over more than 60% of my face. No warpaint that resembled the blood or any other fluid of past conquests - military or romantic.
Once PC Gamer's sole female staffer - Deputy Art Ed Amie - had approved of my neatly trimmed facial hair, suggestively arched eyebrow and wry smile, all I needed was a name. Something with as many bold and handsome connotations as possible, while still sounding faintly like a space pilot.
Meet Cad Dashing. A man who could truthfully introduce himself over a space-martini as "Dashing, Cad." The Extremely Suggestible demographic would be all over me. He had sensible hair, his implants weren't showing and he was pictured against a skulless bachelor pad wall - I considered him a success. I headed straight to the local asteroid belt to pick up chicks.
I'd decided early on that I would only initiate conversation with female avatars, ask early on whether they were also female in reality, and take their word for it either way. Research suggests that a little over half the female characters you'll meet in a typical MMORPG are women in real life (Nick Yee, www.nickyee.com/eqt/genderbend.html). The main reason male gamers don't see many female gamers is that so many react so childishly or obnoxiously when they do. Most girl gamers have learnt not to shout about it.
An intriguingly blue-lipsticked woman was mining Veldspar ore from the asteroids of Duripant I - Belt I. I locked onto Ms Kasteen Hawkeye and set my ship to 'Approach'. This is how flirting will work in the future. As I confidently crossed the asteroid belt to her, I selected 'Capture Portrait' on her profile, which saves an image of the character at high enough resolution to use in the magazine.
But behind the progress bar for that, a dialogue box popped up. The question it was asking me was obscured, but it sounded like one I'd want to say yes to: one option was "Accept the invitation and add Kasteen Hawkeye to my personal address book." Clearly, Cad's rakish appearance had intrigued her, but the interface was unresponsive. This progress bar was blocking everything. This is how flirting will fail in the future.
Cad Dashing is not the kind of space-rogue to be deterred by such setbacks, particularly with such a forward lady. I restarted EVE, headed back to the Belt, and found I had an in-game email from Kasteen. "Hey! ^^" it read. I believe the twin circumflex indicates a raising of the eyebrows - a suggestive one, some neo-linguistics scholars posit.
"Sorry about that." I replied. "EVE crashed while I was attempting to capture your portrait." I thought about this in Cad Dashing mode for a moment. "Clearly you're too beautiful," I added. By the time I arrived back at the Belt, I'd had a reply: "lol ^^". This was a space-dame of excellent taste.
I drifted over to her ship, and we sat. Her mining laser sipped at a classy Scordite, mine the more basic Veldspar. "So," I started, "mine here often?" "just since last night lol" Quickly we get into a debate about converting in-game currency into real money to pay the subscription fee, which I end with "And it takes money to make more money, so selling your in-game currency on a regular basis seriously impairs your profitability. By the way, are you female in real life?" "Orite ^^ & yea i am Lol :p"
Wow, I got an eyebrow raise, a laugh with a capital L and a protruding tongue. Picturing this salvo of facial responses was confusing, but I think the overall impression is positive. I'd assumed this question would be the most problematic, both to ask without seeming sleazy and to get a positive response to, but Kasteen evidently thought little of it. I think I tacked it onto our finance talk pretty subtly, but I also wanted to suggest that I had a reason for asking.
"The developers say girls don't want to be spaceships. But I guess you do?" "I love space & roleplaying games ^^" "Wow, are you single?" "no... odd question to ask though." This is true. In retrospect, it's a much more sleazy thing to ask than a person's real-life gender. I told the truth, but not the whole truth: "That's just my automatic response when a girl expresses an interest in space and roleplaying games."
So Kasteen, with her quick laugh and jiggling eyebrows, was alas unavailable. Still, it had been surprisingly easy to run into a cheerful, friendly girl-gamer who genuinely did want to be a spaceship. She was the first female avatar I ran into - it took me longer to choose my hairstyle than it did to meet someone interesting. Next, I wanted to see if City of Heroes was as ripe for the prowling.
City of Heroes Again, my current characters were unsuitable. This meant creating another vision of masculinity, a walking contradiction of strength and tenderness, a tall, dark and handsome hero whose very name would intrigue and attract. I settled on Manley Power.
He would have to be a Defender. They're the most useful class to have in a team, and have access to Heal Other: the closest superpowers get to flirting. I chose Empathy for my primary power set; it would suggest an inner sensitivity beneath the gruff exterior I would design next. None of the offensive power sets sounded terribly manly, so I went for Archery. It's the only one that uses a weapon rather than some kind of sparkly magic, and I felt a naturally talented hero was more impressive than one who might have found his powers free in a box of radioactive cereal.
Manley Power strode commandingly into Paragon City, black trenchcoat flapping in the wind, black widebrim hiding his mysterious eyes, black T-shirt bearing a, er, manly heart logo, mostly concealed by the coat. Even I was a little attracted to him. Just to seal the deal, I amended his bio page to read "Power's two favourite things are commitment and changing himself."
But the City of Heroes was virtually empty. In its glory days my problem would have been catching anyone's attention with so much ripely bulging spandex around, now it was a dearth of heroines to seduce. Granted, 10.30 on a Tuesday morning is not the traditional time to look for love - or fight crime - but I'd expected a light smattering of tights-wearers.
Out on the streets I had better luck: a level two superheroine in a tartan skirt being bludgeoned by a thug. The etiquette in these situations is sticky: stealing the kill is rude - you take all the Experience for yourself. I waited until she'd hurt him enough to secure the credit, then shot him through the neck.
His previous mugging victim, a nervous man in a suit, hurried over to gush his thanks. I performed the emote 'Fancy bow', which I can't deny looks classy in a long coat. "Lol" commented Alinutza, the tartan-skirted psychic Defender. This was becoming a trend. "Hi." "Hello to you also." "I feel it's important to help the helpless with a degree of finesse." "Lol"
I regarded Alinutza. Dark glasses, red hair, red sports bra, red fingerless gloves, red tartan mini-skirt, red and white striped stockings under knee-high socks, red Converse trainers, the power to kill with her mind. Breasts that more closely resembled a sturdy shelf than human appendages. That last detail was a concern. Although some of the female gamers I know only play sexy characters, all of them object to luridly over-sexualised body shapes. This did not seem like the sort of physiology a real woman would choose.
Still, I invited her to do a mission with me. She accepted and suggested I take the lead. Manley Power approved. I didn't want to spring the obvious question too soon, as it'd be a shame to creep her out if my intuition was wrong. But after skewering most of the goons in the warehouse together, an easy way to broach it occurred: "So, from the sheer size of your character's breasts, I'm guessing you're male in real life?" At exactly the same time, a speech bubble appeared over her own head: "lets go out."
Wait, what? Is Manley Power that attractive that she'd instantly ask his player out? Or was she referring to some sort of cyber-relationship? God, maybe she was male and still wanted to hook up in-game. I should have known when I found myself warming to my creation: I'd made him too pretty. I'd created a manly monster. Hang on, she probably means the warehouse. We've finished, we can leave now. "Yeah, im male lol" Correction, he probably means the warehouse.
I remain convinced that there are plenty of sexy superheroines out there whose secret identity is a little more Catwoman and a little less Crying Game. But with the City largely empty of heroes of either gender, I don't have time to search. I have to introduce myself to the ladies of Azeroth.
World of Warcraft WoW's strict naming conventions and rudimentary character customisation options make it hard to create a hero who stands out. My first choice of dynamic go-getting name, Falcon Eaglehawk, broke about nine of Blizzard's rules. One word, less than twelve letters, OK... Danger. Danger is taken. McDanger? McDanger works. McDanger is a Night Elf, because Gnomes and Night Elves are the only two races with more female players than male. And it's hard to design an impressively manly Gnome.
McDanger is a Rogue, because it's the sexiest-sounding class. McDanger has blue skin, because it's cooler than pink; blue hair, because it looks younger than white; and long hair, because it looks faintly luxuriant. Beyond that, there wasn't much I could do to make the yellow-eyed man with the sword-sized ears any more attractive.
I ran into a minor problem as soon as I entered Teldrassil, the leaf-ceilinged forest home of the Night Elves. Half the Night Elf classes mandate robes, so there as many elf men in dresses bouncing about as actual females. I ran into one of the latter, a fellow Rogue, and asked if she'd seen any Nightsabers. After a long pause, she said that she hadn't. That was about the limit of my small-talk repertoire, so I attempted to invite her to a group with me, but she was already in one.
I moved on - most of the people I'd spotted were levels 4-6, and I reckoned I could catch them up quickly. I stabbed a lot of innocent Thistleboars and Nightsabers, ignored a lot of man-elves in dresses, and was soon a stealthing, backstabbing level 4 Rogue. I was creeping through a cave in search of spider eggs when I came to a crevasse too wide to jump. On the far side, spider eggs, and a pony-tailed elfess in a fetching toffee-coloured dress.
It took me a while to find another way around, but she was still there when I did. "Hi," I said, elbow-deep in the squelching unborn young of the Webwood arachnid. "Hey :D" This is what emoticon lexicons describe as a 'Big, potentially goofy smile.' I suddenly noticed her name, Daemalia, and realised she was the same Rogue I'd failed to strike up conversation with earlier. This time she was free to group, we both got the horrible sticky spider eggs we were after, and we actually hung out in that cave, stabbing its inhabitants, longer than necessary.
I also had a much more polite way of bringing up the subject of real-life gender. "I have a confession. McDanger isn't my real name." "I hope not :D" "It's Tom." "Hey tom, I'm Laura" Laura was from Finland. We taunted spiders for a bit, throwing knives at them from a high rock. "So, Tom, how old are you?" "26, you?" "23 :D" "Ah, I remember the heady days of 23, my whole life stretching before me." "Haha, stop... you're not that much older"
The real advantage of games as a social medium is what you actually do in them while you're talking. Somehow this conversation was much more enjoyable for being repeatedly interrupted by angry, footstool-sized bilious green spiders trying to chew our legs off. Knives flew, backs were stabbed and organs ripped from corpses.
"So, are you just out of uni?" "Never even been :D going to polytechnic in the fall" "What are you going to study?" "Culture and music" "Awesome. Single?" Again, I'd given up trying to find a subtle way to ask this. "Yep :D" The ever-present big, potentially goofy smile. "You?" "Yep."
And that was virtually that. We danced around in a moonwell (she like Alizée, I Michael Jackson), had an epic battle with a Satyr boss, and exchanged MSN details. My little social experiment had gone better than I had anticipated. I'd always known there were more girls playing online games than most men assume, but I hadn't expected the ones I met to be so friendly, sociable and unfazed by my impolitely direct questions.
As for McDanger and Daemalia, as I said, what happens from here is probably too personal to generalise about.
Tom Francis
// Screenshots
No, no, no. No goat skulls, no plastic headgear, no limp fringe.
Lol, great article. It sounds like you had a lot of fun with this research.
I'm a keen MMO'er and have been since the 1st days of SWG. It's not that hard to find really genuinely nice women playing these sorts of online games. And in my experience they are also far more social than male players.
I met my girlfriend in EQ2 about 3 years ago, initially just as guildies that occasionally bumped into each other in-game... To cut a long story short, 2 years ago I left the UK to live in Estonia with her and we're still going strong.
I Don't know about MMO's As I Dont play them, But over at TZ, Another forum site I Visit I Know 6 married couples who met on that very site, and lots of people who've met up and become friends etc. Its not as stupid as it sounds/seems.
really good article, enjoyed reading it a lot. WoW seems to be the best place to find girls in MMOs. Nice girls who happen to enjoy fantasy play Night Elves and hardcore girl gamers play Undead I would know. The only games my sister ever played were The Sims, Cooking Mama and WoW as a Night Elf. It becomes particularly fun and sociable once you get to raiding guild status and spend the evening on TS together. Shame it sucks out your soul...
Two of my friends both found love in MMO's, and going by the tales in this article its becoming even more common.
Personally I swore never to meet anyone in an MMO. I'd probably meet quite a few people with common interests online, but I'm looking for a little more fire and a little less spark.
Great I really enjoy reading this sort of RL meets game kinda article's.
I moved to Sweden to be with my awesome girl friend who I met on the Bloodfeather server of World of Warcraft. Just one of those kind people that respond when you spam the trade channel "LF Deadly Blunderbuss crafter" so she made it for mats only. About 20-25 levels later I ended up in the same guild as her by complete chance <Oprah Windfury> became really great friends and over the first 2-3years of WoW we decided to meet irl, hit it off right away and have been together ever since.
She moved to the UK for our first 6 months, now I have left everything and everybody behind to live in Sweden with her and we are currently having a blast 1 year on....though our WoW time has suffered and my arena teams rating is really crap now but the sex is great!
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