In most games the player model is completely aesthetic and has no bearing on the world around him/her. I see people obsess over the character customization in games and wonder why... it really doesn't matter what YOU look like in a game. If you need eye-candy that bad in a game then something is wrong.

To me it seems freakishly weird for a male to run around in a virtual universe with the identity of a hot looking woman...

Maybe it's just my upbringing in an older and now outdated world but it just seems to me like playing dress up on a Saturday night and trolling the seamier parts of town.

....
No offense to the irl TV community,,, carry on as you are in peace and love.

S

To me it seems freakishly weird for a male to run around in a virtual universe with the identity of a hot looking woman...S

For me it seems extremely disturbing that someone would see its game avatar as an extension of him/herself. That is , at least for my eyes, a clear lack of self security and lack of clear perception of the world. That is a fantasy, and fantasies that you cannot separate from reality are mental disorders, not the other way around!

My main hobby is drawing, and i ma reasonably good at it. In my 12 years of drawing the thing I have drawn most are female faces, because they are beautiful and fascinate me! When I made my eve characters, not for a single moment I even tough on making a male avatar! The same way that in these 12 years I never ever wanted to draw an ugly male face!

Now If you think the picture that you have sculped with eve tools must represent something about your sexuality, then I am sorry for you, you might not notice it, but you DO have a problem! Lack of capability of separate yourself from the things you built in your life is not healthy. This is the type of person that buys an expensive sport car to parade it on street and thing they are better because of it. They accelerate very very fast with these cars on street and feel awesome because they think" I can go so fast!" while they are unable to understand that the merit on going fast is not theirs, its from the engineer that made the car! You are not your car, you are not your drawings, you are not a murderer when you play Grand thief auto, you are not your eve avatar!

If you cannot understand that, I feel sorry for you, because you are among the mass of mentally challenged people that is not even aware of your own surroundings and of yourself.

There are what like 50 women play Eve? LOL

Basically if you choose to play a female character and you are a male in real life then deep down you are a woman and God made a mistake. =P lol

To me it happens right as you create the character. We all know what kind of character we are creating and therefore we all partake in "roleplaying" in some shape or form.

The difference happens when some people create a "character" while other recreate "themselves".

For those who create a "character", gender is of little importance. They will generally go for the gender (if possible) that best suits the character. Gender choice becomes just another "attribute" as other visible parts like hair/size/clothing...

For those who recreate "themselves", gender is probably one of the biggest "requirements". With this mindset, creating a character with the opposite sex generates the issues described in the OP.

Keep in mind, none of the two styles of creating characters should be considered better than the other. Even I, depending on the situation/game/electronic medium, will use one or the other.

It boils down to whether some of us want to play as observers to a story or pretend we are inside the game.

For EVE, I prefer the observer style of gameplay and therefore do not feel gender choice has any effect on how I enjoy the game. Same thing when I watch a movie.

Hey, hey, hey, let's not get nasty about this.
Obviously everyone has different views on the subject, which is natural and cool and interesting, because we're all human beings. I'd be worried if we were all the same. I didn't see anyone bashing anyone for anything to begin with, so there's no reason to continue being pissy about the way some people approach it.

The straight guy says he feels that gay people are missing out because girls are awesome.
Anything wrong with that? Of course he'd feel that way.

A gay person might feel the exact opposite way about the same straight guy, but since he's gay, it's natural he'd feel that way.

Each person is bound to have a different viewpoint, and each one isn't inherently right. Some things might work for some people and others for others, since we all think and relate to things entirely differently. I hope this isn't big news.

And people all have their reasons for picking avatars.
Some peoples' avatars are simply discrete characters - so gender doesn't matter so much to them, because the avatar isn't a representation of the person at the keyboard, it's a digital fictional character who is an egger. And that's cool.
And for some, it's a digital representation, so they make the avatar look like themselves, or how they'd like to look, and act like they would in real life. That's also cool.

Me personally, I have a male as a main and then a secondary female pirate. She's a distinct character from me and myself, but my main is my "space persona," you might say. (Something like Tricia McMillan becoming Trillian.)
And hey, if your space persona or character or whatever ends up being female, that's awesome, as long as you're okay with it and it works for you. That doesn't mean much of anything about your gender or sexuality or what-the-hell-ever, as there's infinite different ways humans relate to these kinds of things. If you have experience in theatre, you probably know a bit of what I'm talking about.

Mine just happens to be male because I'm a guy and I think it's cool to be a guy (though I think girls are cool too), and I can most easily relate to flying around in a spaceship with my center of bodily mass lower than a female's. And yet I have a distinct female character who also flies around, she just shoots a lot more.

I figure I'll just drop this post in here. Wrote it last night in response to a thread that was a Rip-off of this one and got locked because people were being daft (as you can probably extrapolate from a few comments).

I create alts randomly. Random race, gender, and customization options. Except this one. Needed the hood for the name.

whenever I drop by in the Help chat most people think I'm a guy, so I guess everybody just assumes all characters, male or female, are men!