City Of Heroes And Guild Wars

In City of Heroes the character creation is the most fun of the game. The difficult part is picking out what to wear. The character design takes a while. You can pick hairstyles and a rainbow of skin tones. You can cover up or get sexy and wear leather or a martial arts gii. There are hoods, tights, skirts, boots and hats. You can select body types such as muscular or athletic and make body parts large or small, short or tall. The possibilities are virtually endless. Unlike most MMOG's on the market today, seeing the same type characters gets old quick, and CoH offers the most freedom in character building. This is a good way to handle sex and gender in gaming.

In that game, before I could even see my character myself, I was all ready being insulted by some jerk. "Hey you girl, you are as ugly as my ass". This was how I was introduced to CoH. It reinforced that comic books are a boy's world, although many women do play CoH and read, write and design comics. The irony is just how many male players cross dress online. I am betting that many of them wouldn't be caught dead in a dress in real life. Gaming breaks down and challenges many roles that people play in the real world.

In Guild Wars character creation is easy. When I play I choose a female Elementalist. You select the character's face, hair color, skin tone and size. Throughout the game you can buy or find vials of dye with which you can color your armor and customize your look further. More customizable features for faces, hair and clothing are coming in future updates. The female characters all wear rather sexy costumes that do tend to cover up well, while at times also revealing plenty of cleavage and up skirts. I think that this game has found a happy medium in that regard. The attire seems both practical and plausible for fighting.

Where the boys are.

I was surprised to see that often female (looking) characters will take off the armor, and dance around in their underwear! What a strange phenomenon. Surprisingly this doesn't cause much of a stir as you would think. In the common areas players zip in and out eager to get on with the business of playing the game.

Guild Wars does have a community feel to it. It is designed for play with a few friends or alone too. It is a MMOG but it has some unique twists to it that make it especially attractive for women gamers. When you go on a mission, you get to pick whom you want to come with you. There isn't a way for pests to stalk your character and follow you around. Once you leave a town or village the only players that are there are the people in your party. This eliminates the trash talking and online abuse that many female gamers have unfortunately been hassled by. When I hear the stories of women who have been verbally battered online it makes me angry. It makes the nice guys angry as well.