OMG IT'S A CHICK ?1?!

Firstly, to avoid confusion/excitement, I am a male, but the nonsense in the title is unfortunately something that most online gamers would have come across at one point or another. Sadly some gamers are so excited about the prospect of a female talking in a game they are playing on that they are oblivious to the fact that the voice is clearly that of prepubescent boy rather than a girl.

I am an ex WoW (World of Warcraft) addict. I was in a fairly serious raiding guild and played a part in the recruitment of new members so would generally have some relationship built up with the newbies in the guild. Our guild leader, being quite the joker, had a voice masking program to make him sound like a chick when he spoke, he wasn't some freak trying to pass off as a girl for anything sexual, he just did it once in awhile for a laugh. I won't lie though, the voice sounded pretty hot. Whenever we would take newbies on a guild raid he would turn the voice on, almost every time when the newbie would hear his voice, I or someone else would get a private message saying something along the lines of "woah, the guild leader is a girl?" I would play along and say yes etc and then usually get a follow up message of "is she hot?" and depending how much effort we felt like making at the time, we could usually make these people get very interested in this supposed "chick" and they were willing to accept all kinds of ludicrous stories we came up with simply because they were to stoked that they were potentially living out some fantasy of finding a hot girl on WoW.

While we look at reasons why girls may not be as much into games as guys, I think examples of things such as the above are potentially one of the key turn offs. I have no idea what it's like to be female, but I imagine having every second person gush over my gender would be less than appealing. Not to sound like the "White Knight" but I've seen many a conversation where I have put people onto ignore lists etc simply because of the rubbish that starts flowing from some people when a female enters the fray so I can only imagine it sucks even more to be the female. What doesn't help is the huge number of guys using female avatars, trying to cyber people or other rubbish in attempts to score free gold. This is something touched on in the reading where I believe they are called "starfuckers", I'm pretty sure most "starfuckers" I came across in WoW, whoring their avatar out in the middle of Orgrimmar, were males, either that or WoW has the most forward women in the world in terms of sexual advances. Female players that I actually regularly played with on WoW tended to keep their gender pretty much on the low, some choosing male avatars just to avoid the immaturity and not having to deal with PM's whenever they walked through towns asking for cyber etc

While WoW does have a huge user base of highly intelligent people (perusing the forums you come across some really, really bright people) it is also notorious for having some terribly immature people also, so I don't want people who don't game online to get the idea that all online gaming is full of people like the above. What I wonder is that, when looking at the numbers of girl gamers in comparison to guy gamers, is how many girls did we lose from that list because they were turned away from the environment and how many are masquerading as guys so as to avoid it. Obviously I can't get much concrete evidence on that, but this is just what has been on my mind with the gender/gaming topic so I thought I'd throw it out there.

Double clicks starcraft2.exe