Back in the early 2000s, when chat rooms were all the rage, I played in an online RPG. This was pre-Worlds of Warcraft. All of the action was text-based. There were no avatars for characters, so everything that fellow players knew about your PC was due to elaborate descriptions posted in the chat room.
When I was playing in this game, my character was a female half-elf cleric named Arayah. Her alignment was chaotic neutral, and she worshipped the god of mischief, who in this created realm was named Pheylan. Along with a Wisdom score of 18, Arayah had a Charisma score of 17. She was able to use this to her advantage as she would consistently play pranks on other players, usually involving a William Tell type set-up with an apple and a blow dart with a tip dipped in a hallucinogenic drug.
What was perhaps most interesting was how different she was from myself. Where I tend to be awkward in flirting attempts face-to-face, Arayah was confident and able. She had a svelte physique, on display in her skin tight skirt, mid-riff halter top, and knee high leather boots, with long dark brown hair and violet eyes. You know, the cliché woman of fantasy art. This really leads me to a discussion of how we perform gender in these types of games. As a woman, you would think that I would try to avoid stereotype behavior. Yet, I often found myself falling into these tropes head long. For example, Arayah would often act less intelligent than she actually was. I performed my PC gender based on the “Valley girl socialite” archetype. She was the Paris Hilton or Cher from Clueless within this world. This was often used to manipulate male PCs into giving her things. This bimbo act was effective within the world of the RPG, but it makes me wonder what compelled me to perform the character in this way. I have to admit that there was something that felt freeing in being able to be so different from myself. I didn’t feel constrained by the expectations of the real world where a woman is held to higher standards in order to be considered on the same level as men. I was free to be goofy and ridiculous in ways I didn’t feel that I was allowed to in my real life. I was serious college student at the time, in my junior and senior years as an English major trying to figure out what I would do when I graduated.
But yet I can’t help but wonder why we perform gender in this way? It is a question that also plagues me as an actor. I have been called upon to play male characters on the stage in recent years. When first developing the character, I often resort to the basic tenets of male behavior as we understand them from a sociological perspective. For example, men often inhabit more physical space. This is not just about being larger than women but how men occupy the space around them in terms of body position. Men often stand with their legs farther apart, hands on hips, in what is commonly referred to as a power stance, allowing them to take up more of the space around them. Women, on the other hand, tend to try to shrink themselves in the space. Additionally, I find myself trying to deepen my voice because we understand that the tenor of male voices tends to be in a lower register. Were I to perform a male PC in an RPG, I would likely resort to some of these same traits. I am also reminded of an episode of Big Bang Theory where Raj is playing a female character and often resorts to similar feminine behaviors as I did with Arayah.
What makes this interesting is that in the RPG world we tend to bolster these archetypes of masculine and feminine behavior? In a world where anything is possible, why do we resort to the idea socially-acceptable codes of feminine and masculine behavior? Why do we perform the ideas of gender in the same way we expect them to be performed in the real world? How will our performance of gender in these simulated environments change as our own understanding of gender changes? I would like to think that if given the chance to join a new campaign, my performance of gender of a female character would change. I'd also like to think that transgender characters might also be introduced by players or even a DM as an NPC on occasion. Only time will tell, but it is something to be explored in greater depth as culture evolves.
Below are a couple of videos regarding Gender Performance from the PBS Idea Channel on Youtube that I found particularly interesting:
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