Because players see their avatars from a third-person perspective from behind, men are confronted with whether they want to stare at a guy's butt or a girl's butt for 20 hours a week. Or as the study authors put it in more academic prose, gender-switching men "prefer the esthetics of watching a female avatar form." This means that gender-switching men somehow end up adopting a few female speech patterns even though they had no intention of pretending to be a woman.
When men play female avatars in online games, they change the way they speak to conform to female stereotypes—but the way they move betrays their masquerade.
In a recent study reported in Information, Communication and Society, researchers created a custom-built quest in World of Warcraft—the popular online game where players can work together to slay dragons and discover magical treasures. The researchers recruited 375 World of Warcraft gamers and ran them through the quest in small groups. The quest took an average of 1.5 hours to complete, and every participant’s movement and chat were recorded and meticulously coded.
The researchers found that the men were more than three times as likely as the women to gender-switch (23 percent vs. 7 percent). When selecting female avatars, these men strongly preferred attractive avatars with traditional hairstyles—long, flowing locks as opposed to a pink mohawk. And their chat patterns shifted partway toward how the real women spoke: These men used more emotional phrases and more exclamation points than the men who did not gender-switch. In other words, these men created female avatars that were stereotypically beautiful and emotional.
Although the gender-switching men could partially talk the talk, they completely failed to walk the walk. The researchers found that all the men in their study moved around in a very different way than the women. The men moved backward more often, stayed farther away from groups, and jumped about twice as much as the women did. When it came to moving around, the men behaved similarly whether they gender-switched or not. So if you’re trying to figure out if that female Night Elf is really a man, focus on how they move around. As study author Mia Consalvo, a professor at Concordia University, says, “movement is less conscious than chat, so it can be an easier ‘tell’ for offline gender.”
You can read the full article here on wow insider. There are links to the studies in the wow insider article, one is a paid paper and pretty costly!
