project work - Roskilde University Digital Archive

Master degree
Roskilde University, Denmark
Alice BAUDU,
Clémence COIFFARD,
Amélie LAVOUTE
THE CONSTRUCTION AND THE ROLE OF
GENDER IN
WORLD OF WARCRAFT
PROJECT WORK
December 2013
1 2 Abstract
This study focuses on female gender in the creation of virtual bodies in an online multiplayer
gaming context. The framework we defined is the game World of Warcraft, because of its
high popularity and consequent number of subscriptions, which make it a videogame icon.
We wish to find insights on the way female gamers elaborate their virtual identities and how
the latters affect the way they play the game. To clear up these matters, the construction of
gender, the new place of women in the cyberspace and social interactions linked to gender
will be questioned in our analysis. Face-to-face interviews with male and female gamers,
combined to the visual study of players’ avatars, will help us to resolve our research
questions.
3 4 Introduction
6 6
Field of study
8 8
Theoretical framework
18
1. Construction of gender as a social process
1.1. Gender, sexuality and identity
1.2. Consideration of self in everyday life
1.3. Self-representation of women and the virtual male gaze
18
18
20
21
2. Female users and their habits on the cyberspace
2.1. Theorizing cyberspace and gender
2.2. The game as a masculine space
2.3. Motivations for the use of digital technology and online gaming
2.4. The motivations of players: divergences according to gender
24
25
25
27
29
3. Female gamers in MMORPGs and their social presence by using avatar
3.1. Avatars and identification
3.2. Virtual communities
3.3. Female avatars and sexism in game spaces
3.4. The avatar: towards a notion of non-gender?
30
30
33
33
35
4. A semiotic approach to gendered bodies in MMORPG’s
4.1. Connoted avatar, denoted avatar
4.2. Communication and representation in virtual social contexts
4.3. The signs system and the embodied experience in the game
36
36
38
40
Methodology
42
1. Qualitative approach
2. Visual data: semiotic analysis
42
43
Analysis of avatars and gaming experiences
46
1. Presentation of gamers
2. Players and their motivations
3. Self-presentation by gendered virtual bodies
3.1. Identification through an avatar’s gender
3.2. Beyond the gendered identification, the illustration of other choices
4. Gender and social interactions
5. Analysis of avatars as gendered symbols
46
48
51
51
53
55
59
Conclusion
64
Literature Review
66
5 Introduction
During the last decade, games kept attracting more and more people, and this larger part of
the general public who plays, implies the growing interest of women for video gaming. On
the other hand, the study of the social relations between online gaming experiences and the
players’ genders is a relatively under-researched field within communication studies.
Looking at video games through the prism of communication allows for further inquiry into
the development of gamers’ communities and the elaboration of a gamer identity. So far, only
a very few studies have been led regarding female gamers, for instance ‘Doing gender in
cyberspace: The performance of gender by female World of Warcraft players’ (Lina Eklund,
2011) who demonstrated that women show different game-play behaviours and often have a
more intense need to identify with their avatars. Although such prior research studies have
explored various characteristics of female gamers and their gaming experiences, the concept
of gender in gaming remains something quite original to linger on, in the way that the
representation of women in video still generates rich debates. Therefore, our study
investigates the effects of gendered representations in online gaming by looking at both the
ways in which players choose to build their avatars and how their choices affect the way they
socialize by playing the game.
Considered for a long time as just a childish hobby, video games have become an important
part of everyday life in contemporary culture. They ended up being a multi-billion dollar
industry. According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2010, two thirds of
American people played videogames. Still according to the same study, the average gamer is
not considered a child anymore; he/she is now 34 years old, and has been playing for an
average 12 years. This tremendous increase is partly due to the new possibilities for playing
videogames everywhere, including mobile phones, stationary computers and laptops, as well
as video-game consoles. Video games are not reduced to remote controls plugged on a TV
anymore, as they have the capacity to gather players and communities online. Developments
in digital media technologies continue to ease people’s access to videogames.
6 Thus, this new easy approach of videogames certainly attracts more and more female players.
Indeed women are now a sizable part of the gaming demographic and since the mid 1990s
digital games have been a growing leisure activity. Stereotypically the man is the hardcore
gamer and women are viewed as casual facebook-game players (Juul, 2010). However in
reality, Juul shows that most real gamers do not match these stereotypes, players change
preferences and habits over time and casual players often play as many hours each day as
hardcore gamers. Women also underreport on their MMORPGs playing habits, even in
anonymous surveys, making it difficult to estimate accurately how many and how much
women play (Williams et al., 2009).
As regards World of Warcraft, in 2013, 45 % of the gamers were women (Entertainment
Software Association, 2013). Then as technology keeps allowing videogames to become
more widespread, it turns out it is really important to discover and understand the effects
games have on gamers. Indeed, we think that the society is heading toward a gamer culture,
and especially a female gamer culture. Thus, after choosing to focus on the famous online
game World of Warcraft (WoW), it appears necessary to try to understand the way women
create their virtual selves and develop virtual identities as avatars.
WoW was launched during the third semester of 2013 by Blizzard Entertainment, which is an
American video game developer and publisher. In spite of a consequent loss of gamers during
the last years, WoW still gathers around 7,6 million gamers, including male and female.
In addition to its high number of subscribers, this is also particularly relevant to linger on this
game because of the high level of exactitude available when it comes to give a shape to one’s
character. Every choice could then be analyzed. WoW also attracts a lot of gamers for the
wealth of the possibilities it offers: gamers can basically become anything they wish to be, in
the range of the pre-set limitations, from a human character to an evil panda. Some gamers
would then prefer to come up with a character that could be their doppelganger while others
would feel more comfortable elaborating their virtual identities on the base of a fantastic
creature. Added to the choice of physical characteristics, gamers also have to decide which
class (job) they want to have and to which race they wish to belong to. These choices need to
be analyzed to truly understand how the meaningful construction of virtual characters affect
gamers’ experiences. Eventually, in WoW, the game is ruled by serious social dimensions
that follow a familiar logic of classes and races, this is why it is interesting to use this game
7 to attempt to understand how female players choose to elaborate their virtual identities.
Besides, genders studies in online gaming appear quite relevant to us because of the wellknown sexism in the gaming world and the representation of female bodies that mostly only
resides in visual stereotypes.
Research question
Thus it seems relevant for us to ask the following research questions:
-
How do female WoW players create their virtual bodies in order to visually represent
their identities?
-
How do their virtual identities affect the way they play the game?
Namely we are about to study the relationship between the way one chooses to virtually
represent oneself and the way they perform in the social world of WoW.
Moving from the assumption that the representation of female gender is usually very
stereotypical in video games, our research problem deals with how women consider, create
and deal with their virtual identities. We will provide a number of visual examples and
support our analysis with comments from players in the following sections.
Field of study
History of online gaming
In order to understand the importance of online gaming in
modern life, it is necessary to explore the advent of gaming as
a part of the Western culture with a retrospective glance. The
first multiplayer game that is known was called Spacewar. It
was created in 1961 by Steve Russel in collaboration with his
colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At
first only two gamers were able to play together, it was only
available on network gaming a few years later, in 1969. This ‘game was truly novel and
relied on the actual capabilities of the computer’ (Nielsen, Smith and Tosca, 2008).
8 In 1973, Maze War was created. As soon as it was
released it was considered as the first ‘real’ network
game, and also the first three-dimensional game space
including a first person perspective. In that same year the
game Dungeons and Dragons was established as a digital
media, namely a computerized role playing game.
Meanwhile, the MUD, ‘Multi User Dungeon/Domain’
was first developed in 1972. In these games the actions
are described textually rather than being simulated visually, and one has to play by using a
command line. Indeed, the first MUDs were text-based. Gamers had missions to achieve. The
first MUD was called Adventure and it was issued in 1972. Furthermore, Elvira Mortensen
who does researches on Video Games, asserted that MUD and WoW were directly connected
to each other: ‘WoW and MUD fill the same niche in the gaming world and have the same
functions’ (2006, 397).
In parallel, during the 1980’s, some role-playing games kept appearing such as Ultima
(1981), Wizardy (1981), King’s quest (1984), Bard’s Tale (1985) and Might and Magic
(1986). These games worked according to a solo mode but used the same logic as did roleplaying games influenced by Dungeons and Dragons.
Later, during the 1990’s, we faced a tremendous growth of this kind of network gaming that
had remained quite hard to access before. For instance, the games Doom and Quake that
issued between 1993 and 1996 allowed from 4 to 16 gamers to play together. This rise was
permitted thanks to the stabilization of the Internet and some more successful and reliable
games. Gamers became more and more numerous and the popularity of network gaming kept
rising. Besides, from a technological and an aesthetic point of view, the games turned into
more attractive hobbies, offering a wider range of choices in terms of characters and
environments that could be chosen to play with.
That is the moment of the birth of the term ‘MMORPG’: Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games.
9 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)
In the end of the 1980’s and in the beginning of the 1990’s, what are considered as the first
MMORPG appeared: Island of Kermain (1984), Nerverwinter Nights (1991), which is
adapted from Dungeons and Dragons and Legend of Future Past (1992). (Maude Bonenfant,
2010)
Yet this is mostly thanks to the game Meridian 59, that was created in 1996, that we can truly
notice the links and influences of MUD and MMORPG on WoW. Indeed, in this game,
players have to kill monsters and get rid of other gamers. They also have to choose between
different classes of avatars, which will be developed below. Moreover, the influence is also
noticeable in the way the game works, since gamers have to pay monthly subscriptions. This
is a first because previously gamers had to pay by the hour. The scheme will be repeated in
WoW. Then, in March 1997, the game Ultima Online gathered 20 000 subscriptions and it
marked the beginning of the success and popularity of online gaming.
Eventually,
the
game
EverQuest that came out in
1999 is generally considered to
be the most direct ancestor of
WoW. It dealt with a fantastic
medieval
context
where
creatures had to be killed. In
this game genders were highly
marked and the representation
of the female body design
matched strong stereotypes of
attractiveness and could go as
far as reach a certain eroticism
Figure 1. All rights reserved.
(Figure 1).
10 Thus, it is possible to claim that
the premises of the general
functioning of WoW is the
result of a long process that
lasted several years during
which network gaming and
online
games
were
being
developed and enriched. Our
investigation shows that the
visual
styles
developed
matched
and
the
have
also
increasingly
physical
and
cultural stereotypes of
Figure 2. All rights reserved.
attractiveness in regards to female bodies.
Avatars’designs in WoW are then pervaded of these previous graphics even if the female
representation does not go as far as the erotic one in EverQuest that is presented above
(Figure 2). WoW elaborated and detailed such character representations by combining
various assets developed in the previous games and placing the setting in a medieval-fantastic
framework where quests had to be led, and provided a large choice of characters from
realistic to fantastic. This eventually led to the creation of a highly acclaimed fantasy game,
which gathered more than 12 million players at its peak and became one of the first online
games to assemble so many loyal female gamers. It is even possible to assume that these
(relatively more) truthful approach to human body representations can be one of the reasons
why women became a wide part of WoW gamer community.
World of Warcraft
The universe of World of Warcraft is an extended and detailed universe. Lord of the Rings
written by Tolkien and the game Dungeon and Dragons widely inspired it. According to
‘World of Warcraft is an enormous game, both in term of hours spent playing it and in terms
of the number of players and the ways in which it can be played’ (Corneliussen and Walker
Rettberg, 2008).
11 The video game WoW was published in 2004. It is derived from a series of real-time game
that is called Warcraft. The development of WoW includes various consequent versions and
official expansions:
-­‐
Warcraft : Orcs & Human (1994)
-­‐
Warcraft II : Tides of Darkness (1995)
-­‐
Warcraft III : Reign of chaos (2002)
-­‐
Expansion of Warcraft III : the Frozen Throne (2003)
The company that developed Wow was founded in 1991 and was called Silicon and Synapse
by Allen Adham, Michael Morhaime and Frank Pearce. In 1994, she was renamed Blizzard
Entertainment and became quite popular thanks to Starcraft (a strategy game) and Diablo (an
adventure game) series. With Wow, Blizzard Entertainment has produced one of the most
profitable games in the history of online gaming: according to the company, annual revenues
amounted to one billion dollars, as it was stated by the French searcher Fanny Georges in her
thesis about Semitoque of representation in digitized devices (Fanny Georges, 2007). The
WoW game does not revolutionize the world of MMORPG, however it strengthens it in the
way that it offers a serious and stable game in a rich and detailed universe. According to
Miguel Sicart, ‘World of Warcrafl is, at the moment of writing, not only the most successful
MMORPG in the world, but also the design example for other developers to follow’ (Sicart,
2009, 180).
The success of World of Warcraft is based on the fact that the game is accessible to a large
number of players and provides access to a ‘hollow world’(Aarseth, 2008), namely it is a
world where no outside cultural references exist and therefore this is a game where people
from very different cultures can gather and play together. Moreover, the success of WoW in
attracting such a wide number of loyal gamers can be associated to what Espen J. Aarseth
(2008) calls ‘cultural neutrality’. According to Aarseth, this game is not marked culturally
even if it is produced in the United States and the values of this country dominate and guide
Western ideas. The frame and the quests that are led are far enough from any reality to be
able to gather any cultural habits. Therefore, WoW generates a new cultural setting, which is
both influenced by and distinguished from conventional western cultures of the offline world.
12 Principles of game play and user interactions in World of Warcraft
Each player has an avatar and a point system that determines its power. Players achieve
missions and can fight other players directly. The dominant purpose in WoW is to progress,
to acquire more power.
Three modes of playing can be used. Firstly, the standard mode or ‘Player Versus
Environment’ (PvE) is a mode where the player fights environment. Pre-programmed
creatures can only kill the avatar. The gaming goals are oriented. Secondly, the player has the
possibility to access to the ‘Player Versus Player’ (PvP) mode. The avatar in PvP mode
cannot only be attacked by a pre-programmed creature but also by other players. We can also
find areas whose purpose is to be used as fighting arenas and battlegrounds. The third game
mode is the mode role-play or ‘RP’. The player has a role defined by the characteristics of
their avatar, namely their virtual body in the game. We will linger on this character, its
elaboration and its meaning below. Communication between players is governed by rules:
one avatar is not able to interact with any avatar whenever it want, a pre-determined scenario
has to be followed.
As regards the points of view: the avatar in WoW can be played in first or third person views.
This is a very important point, because the points of view affect gameplay and the way you
see yourself and others within the game. Points of views then have an influence on social
interactions in WoW, making them more direct or more distant and determining the
proximity between two avatars. Besides, the player controls the camera and can see their
character at a 360 ° angle. Each avatar has characteristics that have an impact on the game
experience:
-­‐
The faction: it is a social organization that depends on history and mythology. There
are two kinds of factions: the Horde (with monstrous creatures) and the Alliance (with
characters resembling human). According to Nicolas Ducheneaut, in From Tree
House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft, ‘Choosing a
faction affects a player's experience significantly’ (Ducheneaut, 2006).
-­‐
The race: Each race population has different geographic locations and is associated
with a city (or capital) where the player starts. The different races are attached to
different stories. The races are:
13 Alliance
Horde
Humans
Orcs
Night elves
Forsaken
Dwarves
Tauren
Gnomes
Trolls
Draenei
Blood elves
Worgen
Goblins
Tushui pandaren
Huojin pandaren
-­‐
The gender: The player can choose between the masculine and the feminine.
-­‐
The class: The player has the choice in eleven possible classes which are Death
Knight, warlock, druid, shaman, hunter, warrior, mage, paladin, priest, thief (rogue) and
monk. According to Miguel Sicart in 2009, ‘Class is particularly important because it
determines which kind of gameplay the player will engage in the most’ (Sicart, 2009,
177).
After choosing the faction, race, class and gender of his avatar, a few other customization
options are offered to the player like hair colour, hairstyle, makeup, etc.., But, according to
Sébastien Genvo, ‘these changes appearances have no impact on the modes of action in the
game world’ (Genvo, 2009, 208). As we will try to confirm of infirm it thanks to the
interviews we will lead in our following study: what influence may the customization options
have on the game play? Furthermore, the player must ultimately choose a pseudonym that
respects the spirit of the game and identify his avatar permanently. The creation of the avatar
is also based on:
-­‐
Profession: the player has the option to choose a primary profession (either
production or collecting of resources) and secondary skills (eg, fishing, first aid or
cooking). Through these secondary skills, the player can collect, transform, sell and
consume resources.
-­‐
The objects: there are various types of objects in WoW. For example, axe, flowers,
animal organs ... The objects may sell more or less expensive at auction or merchants.
-­‐
The equipment: a character can wear 16 parts in the maximum, which can cover
different parts of the body. Equipment gives bonus attributes of a character. Among
14 the facilities include armour. There are different types of armour but not wearable by
all classes. Some classes are limited to leather or cloth armours (hunters, shamans,
druids, thieves). The role of this equipment is to reduce the damage.
The power of avatars is calculated from a statistical system that depends on experience and
level of the avatar attributes (strength, agility ...), abilities ... The avatar starts at 1 to reach the
level 80. With the new extension, the level is now 95. There is a possibility to move beyond
this level. A player can have a maximum of 50 avatars.
Thus, the elaboration of one’s virtual body is a really determining step in the building of an
online identity. Such a wide possibility of choices and details truly help the gamer to be
represented only according to what he wants to show and reveal about himself, may it be far
or close to reality. Some may see it a way to escape reality or even to quench a fantasy,
gender is no more perceived as something imposed but as a choice.
The evolution and the acquirement of a growing power in the game can be achieve on one’s
own. However, some activities are done in groups. Groups may be temporary, but a stable
social organization exists to coordinate avatars: the guild. According to Corneliussen and
Walker Rettberg (2008) in ‘The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post) Colonialism in
World of Warcraft », Digital Culture, Play, and ldentity: A World of Warcraft Reader, the
guild is the tool to cement the social groups in the game: ‘the social aspect of this world is
vital, and the guild system is the most important tool for holding social groups together’. It is
the place of formation of the main relationships between the players and their social structure
in the game. Usually, the type of guild varies primarily with the objectives of the ‘leaders’. In
most cases, guilds aim to create a sense of belonging to a community of players and the
performance of certain tasks, especially raids. Each guild has its objectives and provides
various services to its members (lending money, donated items, help in the pursuit of a quest,
etc..). Thus, the gamer has a specific and personal role to play and they feel needed in the
game. This system triggers a feeling of consideration that reveals itself to be addicting and
make gamers loyal to the virtual community they belong to and they may also value it as
much as real life community.
15 One of the activities performed to quickly accumulate experience points (for avatars under 95
level), of reputation or money is the quest. According to Nicolas Ducheneaut in 2006, in
From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft, ‘completing
quests and killing ‘mobs’ (monsters) allows them to earn ‘experience points’ and reach
progressively higher level [...], improving the abilities of their character and acquiring
powerful items along the way’. Quests consist of more or less difficult tasks that the player
chooses to achieve or not. There are no mandatory quests and most of them are done once.
Critical approaches to virtual bodies and gender stereotypes in WoW
Hilde G. Corneliussen (2008) observes links between feminist approaches in regard to equal
representation of women in society and the female avatars in WoW. Although the creatures
are almost all imaginary in WoW, this game can be seen as a similar representation of
Western codes: ‘a place where gender is being constructed, represented, and negotiated in
ways not totally different from hegemonic Western discourses of gender’ (Corneliussen,
2008). Representation of women in the game reflects that of the women in society: WoW
reproduces certain stereotypes, but also disrupts other, echoing different visions of feminism.
Namely, women are represented according to the common codes of attractiveness but not in
an erotic or demeaning way, and they also have a great independence and strength that make
them able to beat some male avatars.
Moreover, Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell and Moore (2006), in their quantitative study of
223,043 avatars, claim that existing prejudices outside of the game are applied in WoW. In
fact, they conclude that «real-world stereotypes come to shape the demographics of fantasy
worlds». For example, esthetical criteria of the players are indicative of standards of beauty
outside the game: the most popular avatars are humans and elves while the least chosen are
orcs and trolls. While each class has a slight advantage concerning attributes, these benefits
are so small that they are not significant in the choice of the race of the avatar and even less
sex. Thus, the differences are not only aesthetics; they reflect the trends followed to the
outside of the game. If physical appearance and ‘cosmetic’ of the avatars influence the
choices of the players in relation to their usual standards, it is the same with moral standards
as the Horde, which historically represents the ‘evil’ and is much less ‘preferred’ than the
Alliance. Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell and Moore conclude that WoW merely reproduced
16 existing stereotypes in the culture outside the game: ‘the distribution of races and classes
indicates strong preferences for characters fitting stereotypical canons of morale and beauty,
perpetuating offline norms in virtual environments’ (2006).
Finally, Jessica Langer (2008) shows that the perspective of the Same and the Other, the
civilized and the savage, the centre and the periphery, help describing the Alliance and the
Horde and show similarities with the image of the foreign common colonial ideology of the
West. In fact, ‘the Alliance and the Horde are divided along racial lines not into good and evil
but into familiar and other or foreign, and that this division has consequences not only within
the game but in the real world as well’ (Langer, 2008, 88). According to this author, WoW
reproduced some models of racism, but this game is also critical, just as it comes to the
question of the representation of women.
Thus, even if it set in a medieval-fantasy universe, gamers still care a lot about the message
their virtual bodies and identities convey, and general cultural rules are not entirely casted
aside but still consist in a global guideline.
The avatar and the self-representation
The etymology of the word ‘avatar’ (avatara) comes from the Indian mythology. The word
was used to express Vishnu’s descent among human beings. The avatar allows the god to act
as a normal figure on earth. In the nineteenth century, the avatar meant ‘metamorphosis’. An
avatar is thus the result of a process of transformation. The avatar is designed as an
intermediary between two worlds. In video games, the avatar is the representation of the
player in action in the game world. Generally in the world of video games, avatar locates the
user in the world of signs. Its displacements are interfaced (through keyboards, joysticks,
motion sensors, the avatar sends information in the diegetic space and can also receive some.
The user interfaces transmit the reaction of the environment. The avatar is then an incarnation
of the gamer's actual body through the prism of representation. Metaphorically, it operates an
association (transfer, transformation, metamorphosis), between subject and representation,
and between the real and the diegetic world. According to Fanny Georges in 2007, the selfrepresentation on the screen may be compared to multiple-choice questions: the individual
selects semantic units, like building a Chinese profile, and the latters convey cultural
connotations. To illustrate the difference between the transmitted message and the received
17 message, the author quotes Montaigne in Les Essais, ‘in order to paint and describe me to
others, I painted me with colours that were not mine in the first place’.
Moreover, Fanny Georges explains that the self-representations and on-screen avatars involve
different characteristics. They convey four ideas:
•They act: talk, thank and express feelings
•They embody and represent a rite of a passage
•They are a mark of power
•They have a ‘symbolic’ dimension
Self-construction on screen is a mean to escape from real life. This is to develop a social
identity and convey messages and information. Thus, the specificity of the screen is to
provide a representation of oneself visible from a third person view. Self-representation on
screen mediates between self and oneself but also between oneself, the other and the world.
We will then have to discover in our study, the way people consider themselves through their
avatars and the weight that is given to social interactions according to the relationship gamers
have with their avatars.
Theoretical framework
1. Construction of gender as a social process
1.1. Gender, sexuality and identity
To understand the relationship between gender and identity online and especially in
MMORPG, we should first describe what we mean by ‘gender’. In her work Gender trouble
(1990), Judith Butler questions the definitions of gender and highlights by the presumption of
heterosexuality induced at birth. For her, belonging to one gender is defined by a moral law
and gender is determined by culture. But the subject is ‘a male construction’ which excludes
‘the structural and semantic ability of the female gender’ (Butler J., 1990). Thus, she
challenges the binary approach to gender and she highlights the existence of norms that seem
natural to be reproduced. (Namely, ‘you are born a boy or a girl’). However, theorists
question the creation of gender identity in a natural way. This is the case of Michel Foucault,
18 who revolutionized the binary approach (or you're a man or you're a woman). To him, the
concept of a single sex was built for the purpose of social regulation and control over the
sexuality.
‘We are in a society of ‘sex’, or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of
power are addressed to the body, to life, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its
ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health,
progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of
sexuality and to sexuality; the later was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a
target.’(FOUCAULT M., History of sexuality, 1976, p147)
The many possibilities that offered by the video games, especially WoW where a player can
be a gnome, a worgen or a tauren, may affect the study of gender in virtual environments.
Indeed, a player can be a male or female character in the game world and play anonymously
regardless of his/her gender in the real life. In this way, the representation he/she has of
himself/herself can be different.
Thus, gender and sex is an act, but the author recognizes that sexuality and gender is our
gender identity.
Gender, in the work of Judith Butler, is the result of a construction according to the acts. It is
a sort of ‘practice’ (‘a doing’). It is not mobile and it evolves. Thus, the identity of an
individual is not stable, because in perpetual evolution, under a construction. Indeed, ‘Gender
is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory
frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being’ (Butler, 1990, p43-44).
It follows from the construction of each individual even though it may seem naturally
established. But gender norms determine how the genre should be built. Complying with
these standards is to become ‘legible as a human’ and then being understood. Thus, each built
its gender. However, this is not a purely individual construction even if everyone can create
its own gender. Indeed, it builds its gender for others as a ‘binding context'.’ It can be said
that the terms (male, female) that develop our recognition as a human result of a social
construction.
19 In saying that gender is ‘performative’ Judith Butler also shows that gender is not a choice
everyday. The construction of gender is made from repeating standards. The philosopher uses
the term ‘iterability’, she defined as ‘a regularized and constrained repetition of norms’.
Thus, Judith Butler proposes to rethink gender in relation to heterosexuality imposed by
society. According to her, the political construction created the category ‘woman’. Allows
creating the kind of sex but it also helps to keep women in a context of domination, in a
position of inferiority. Gender becomes a standard created by the political and cultural
institutions that transforms the biological gender (the one we have at birth), in a socialized
gender (resulting from the repetition of standards).
Thus, we can ask whether this construction of gender is found in the space of the game
choosing a character of the opposite sex, identification of the player's character will question
the boundaries of the gender. This identification also explains how social norms can also
affect the construction of an online identity. Indeed, the game space could then be space for
male domination. However, what would it be about female players? We set out to uncover
the different strategies and practices employed by female players in order to challenge the
assumed male domination of WoW’s symbolic environment.
1.2. Consideration of self in everyday life
When a person interacts with other individuals, they commonly try to obtain information
about them. At first it will be to learn more about his ‘socio economic status, his conception
of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness’ as Erving Goffman
says it (1959). Those are the first elements, which individuals naturally seek to inquire about
each other in the physical world. This phenomenon may also be mirrored in online games as
regards avatars and what they could reveal about their owners. These information are useful
in real life social interactions since they enable people to know what to expect of someone,
and then the best way to communicate with them. Conduct and appearance are the easiest
ways to inquire details and they ‘allow people to apply their previous experience with
individuals roughly similar to the one before them or to apply untested stereotypes to him’.
Besides individual can rely on ‘assumptions, as to the persistence and generality of
psychological traits as a means of predicting his present and future behaviour’. (Goffman,
1959)
20 Yet, this cannot be entirely applied as such in an online gaming context, since avatars do not
systematically reflect the exact appearance of actual gamers. However, the choices that are
made to elaborate an avatar also reveal a lot about the gamers’ wishes and desires and what
they aspire to.
‘Many crucial facts lie beyond the time and place of interaction or lie concealed within it’
(Goffman, 1959). Namely the context has to be taken into high consideration when it comes
to interpret the meaning of the appearance of an avatar. Yet Goffman’s ideas may be used
regarding the analysis of the behaviour of a person, and here an avatar. According to
Ichheiser’s (1949) terms, an individual acts and behaves in two possible ways when it comes
to express oneself: intentionally or unintentionally. Indeed, Goffman suggests that two
different kind of sign activity determines our capacity to communicate messages: the
expression that an individual gives and the expression he gives off. The first one involves
verbal symbols and the information that are neutrally conveyed in an oral way. ‘This is
communication in the traditional and narrow sense. The second involves a wide range of
actions that can be treated as symptomatic of the actor, the expectations being that the action
was performed for reasons other than the information conveyed in this way’ (Goffman,
1959). An individual can then convey misinformation thanks to both of these types of
communication, ‘the first involving deceit, the second feigning’ (Goffman, 1959). Even
though we are able to study the way the avatar is made to act and behave, as it is also the case
for its capacity to verbally communicate with other avatars within the game. The analysis will
be more complex and deeper in an online gaming context since the avatars are already
skewed in the way that gamers do not behave online as they do in real life.
1.3. Representation of women and the virtual male gaze
Laura L. Sullivan’s study (1997) about self representation of women and the virtual male
gaze points to the way that objectification of women is similar to and different from that in
other media such as film and critiques. Sullivan also criticises the sexism of male media
theorists of cyberspace. ‘Cybersexism’ would entail structural and psychological changes:
male and female must examine the ways they are encouraged to participate in sexism and
learn to make different choices. Sullivan lingers on two very important aspect of
21 ‘cybersexism’, namely feminist ideas about the male gaze and philosophical ideas about
cyberspace.
In 1972, John Berger published Ways of seeing in which he discusses modern visual culture
by focusing on the way women tend to be objectified in cultural representations. From that
moment, many cultural and literary theorists have been influenced by his work. Besides, this
objectification speaks to a wide range of people and areas since it occurs both in high and low
culture.
As Berger said it ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at’. In an article from 1975 called ‘Visual pleasure and narrative
cinema’, Laura Mulvey draws the psychoanalytic framework in order to understand the
gendered position of viewer and viewed, mostly in classical Hollywood cinema. Yet, we can
forward this framework to the videogames area, since the popular clichés of female
attractiveness and representation are considered in the same excess. (For instance, the
character of Lara Croft is as attractive as unreal, just like most of the James Bond girls).
Yet, several feminist critics pointed out the flaws of Mulvey’s theory. Indeed, unlike in video
games, Hollywood movies, and especially such as melodramas which are directly addressed
to women, tend to give more and more modern visions of women. While Mulvey’s feminist
point of view lingered more on analyzing the way women were represented in movies,
namely how the camera systematically films an actress from the actor/male interlocutor’s
point of view with a high-angle shot to emphasize the height difference between the two
protagonists and make the public aware that the female character is not in a position of
strength.
Feminist studies truly became interested in television in the 1970’s and 1980’s and the theory
of the male gaze was modified again, for example feminist cultural analysts got interested in
female forms of television such as soap operas and tried to describe the profile of a ‘resistant’
female viewer. We need to discover in our analysis about female players if such a profile
exists in the online playing field. The ‘resistant’ female viewer profile then resides in the fact
that women tend to have a more critical way of watching TV shows that are targeted for
them, with a brander derision and irony. This profile is what feminist analysts linger on and
this is the feminist advent in movies, the way they are perceived, not the way women are
22 represented because that point filled with clichés has trouble to evolve. Our main goal in
studying avatars from a gender-oriented perspective is to combine this feminist perspective
with the analysis of representations of female characters as gendered virtual bodies. The
feminist optic allows us to focus on the objectification of female bodies in visual media and
question the relations of symbolic power.
Fredric Jameson (1981) asserts that the origin of women’s general oppression and uneasiness
resided in the constant objectification of their faces and bodies in mainstream mass media.
This statement truly emphasizes the paramount influence of media, movies and videogames
in our lives and the way we perceive each other. By using and re-using the same codes and
the same stereotypes over and over, they all end up fitting into one and unique scheme of
representation that is adopted by the whole population and which affects our social
interactions. Indeed, this idea is linked to Berger’s because, according to him, how we look
gets translated into who we are and how much (self) worth we have. Berger (1972) adds that
‘women internalize this objectification and in turn feel bad about themselves, because no
woman can ever measure up the stereotypes promoted by mass media images’.
Roland Barthes (1980) also adds that women, and especially western women have been
conditioned to attempt to project qualities all associated with physical appearance and
sexuality (attractiveness, beauty, and often seduction itself). Women are then conditioned to
look eminently photographable at all time, and speaking of photography there is an
interesting link that can be made with gaming avatars as regards the look of others upon
oneself. Indeed, some of the ladies that were observed by Barthes in a context of a
photographic shooting revealed that feeling observed by the lens they would instantaneously
make another body for themselves, namely transform themselves into an image. To him, this
self-transformation for women, this posing is incessant: they are constantly remaking and
reworking their bodies. Liberal feminist Naomi Wolf also articulates the paramount role of
beauty imperatives in women’s oppression in The Beauty Myth (Wolf, 1991). Our task is then
to discern the way that such imperatives operate in cyberspace. From that predicate we have
to discover if a similar scheme is applicable to the creation of avatars, if women elaborate
them with the same thoroughness, since in the virtual world this virtual character will
embody their identity.
23 What is then relevant here is to study the way female gamers feel about their own bodies
when playing through an avatar, how much and in which measures they feel a personal
identification with their avatars. In order to understand the social effects of playing with
gendered virtual bodies, we chose to also include the experiences of male gamers in our
analysis, and investigate how they describe their interactions with female avatars and the role
gender plays in those interactions. Thus, we will be able to analyze what is the true meaning
of an avatar to a gamer and in which measures it mirror its owner’s personality.
2. Female users and their habits on the cyberspace
Some new characteristics appeared with the advent of the World Wide Web, making it more
specific to analyze the female body representation in this particular area. The feminist
perspective asserts that the theoretical frameworks about cyberspace and mass media have
been a field of gender struggle, as it was mostly led by male-oriented perspective (Sullivan,
1997). Indeed, Karen Coyle’s (1996) analysis of advertisements underlines an important
statement: the computer culture was coded as male. Since the last decade, female users were
considered a much smaller portion of Web user community than men (Borsook, 1996). A
similar argument can be made by looking at MMORPGs, whose target is usually
predetermined to be male heterosexual gamers. This is why it is interesting to study the way
female gamers appropriate the games and especially the MMORPGs, considering how they
penetrated to a domain which was considered to be a male-oriented one. As Berger points it
out, this situation of male dominance not only determines most relations between men and
women but also the relation of women to themselves. Thus the building of female virtual
identities and bodies says a lot about the way they consider themselves in a virtual world
where they have not always been said to belong to. Thus, the study of how female virtual
bodies and identities are constructed can inform the analysis of avatars as self-representations
in virtual worlds where women are usually not considered a significant user group.
Our aim is to find out if this new technology and the social interactions internet allow in
online gaming truly reinforce and amplify such oppressions in new ways or, on the contrary,
weakens them by reducing pre-existing gaps.
24 On the other hand, when it comes to online gaming, gender and identity turn out to become
‘infinitely plastic in a play of images that know no end’ (Sullivan, 1997). Namely the
personality and the body cannot be truly transcribed through a series of avatars, no matter
how precise they may be. We believe that the wealth of the human personality could then
never be entirely virtually transcribed.
2.1. Theorizing cyberspace and gender
The advent of a gendered gaming culture suggests the possibility of plural existence of online
worlds. The female gamer communities provide a resourceful new field to study gender in
virtual environments; thus, attract various research disciplines that question the female
appropriation of what was considered a man’s world. Sarah Baker (2011) led a study on
‘Playing online: Pre-teen Girls’ negotiations of pop and porn in cyberspace, and came to the
statement that young people’s engagement with the Internet was equal to see cyberspace as
offering a ‘virtual bedroom’, especially for girls, ‘often emphasizing the private or personal
nature of online engagement’. Indeed, the bedroom being the prime physical site of girls’
‘consumption of cultural artefacts’, Baker’s comparison seems appropriate.
The online environment enables bedroom culture to be reproduced and the Internet may go as
far as retaining the privacy of the bedroom in a way. Both the internet and the bedroom help
young people to illustrate the role of individual space in identity, and especially young people
identities.
Sarah Baker adds that the bedroom gives us a useful metaphor for examining young people’s
online cultural practices and that these practices that ensue from their identity are structured
by their habitus. Indeed, ‘the girls’ exploration of identity using computers is structured by
their habitus, what Pierre Bourdieu describes as ‘the embodied dispositions of biographical
experience’. Through our study of avatars, we aim to find out if people elaborate their virtual
bodies with elements of themselves they would only usually reveal in the intimacy of their
bedroom.
2.2. The game as a masculine space
Fox & Tang (2013) considers the game world a masculine space. It is also a place where
anonymity is possible, which encourages harassment. According to the two authors, ‘Despite
25 the number of female gamers, video games have traditionally been perceived as a male space,
an activity created by men and for men’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 1).
In view of interactions in multiplayer games, women, like other minorities, are subject to
harassment. This is amplified if they do not have an attitude conforming to the expected
behaviour. According to Yee in Maps of digital desires: Exploring the topography of gender
and play online games ‘They (women) are constantly reminded of the intended male subject
position they are trespassing upon’ (Yee, 2006, 93). In the experiment of Kuznekoff and Rose
(2013) about a violent video game where the players use pre-recorded voices to interact, the
female voice is found to receive three times the amount of negative comments than the male
voice had received. A part of the commentaries reported traditional sexism (e.g. ‘get back to
the kitchen’) and sexual harassment (e.g. ‘show me your tits’). Thus, the game is perceived
like a ‘man’s world’ which contains a masculine discourse and where the women are
considered ‘outsiders’. In fact, men consider that women violate the ‘normative sex role
behaviour simply by participating in many networked games’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 2;
Taylor, 2006).
But, what is the importance of the game space for men? For adolescent and young adult
males, the virtual space of the game can be an important social resource to explore their
masculinity and identity. Moreover, it’s a place to bond with other male and create
interaction with people of the same gender. In addition, ‘in the realm of video games, males
are likely to defer to their masculine social identity’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 2). Video games
are an environment where male identity is strengthened. Furthermore, ‘it is likely that the
reinforcement of this identity will promote greater depersonalization and stereotyping of
women over time’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 3).
In a study conducted with 300 participants (220 men and 75 women), Fox & Tang in 2013
studied compliance with masculine standards in video games. They identified two reasons for
social dominance: The desire for power over women and the need for heterosexual selfrepresentation. Indeed, ‘by making sexual overtures to female players or demanding pictures
of women’s breasts, male players are asserting their heterosexuality to co-players’. Moreover,
the representation of women in the game suggests that the latters are powerless, ‘casted as
either sex objects or damsels in distress’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013). The aggressiveness of some
players against women also has a link with the consumption of other media. According to
Sharrer (2001, 2005), exposure to certain violent television content expose men to programs
that encourage hyper-masculinity. We believe pervasive use of online games can result in
26 similar effects in people’s behaviour. The themes of video games may ‘increase hypermasculinity and promote greater sexism towards women’. (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 5) The
consequence of the behaviour of male players is a difficult relationship between men and
women in these environments. Indeed, ‘women report negative psychological effects in
misogynistic experience harassment’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, p5; Miner-Rubino & Cortina,
2007).
According to these perspectives, we can consider WoW as a male-dominated social game
space. However, the number of female players is constantly evolving. Then we can wonder
whether WoW female players suffer this type of harassment and whether WoW male players
repeats the social norms of dominance in game space. We assume that female players face
the risk of being outsiders if they refuse to conform to the masculine social rules in game
spaces. This assumption brings forth the virtual space of WoW also as a space for gendered
social norms and sexism. The effects of interacting in such a gendered space would also have
an impact on how female players represent their identities visually through their avatars. This
may also have an impact on the relationships they have with male players and their gameplay
strategies.
2.3. Motivations for the use of digital technologies and online gaming
To study how people create their virtual bodies, it is important to understand why people play
WoW. In other words, what are the players’ motivations for online gaming?
Some past research show that achievement, socialisation and immersion in virtual worlds,
such as what propose MMROPGs, are the mains explicit reasons. However, another study led
by Billieux, Van Der Linden, Achab, Khazaal, Paraskevopoulos, Zullino and Thorens (2012),
Why do you play World of Warcraft? An in-depth exploration of self-reported motivations to
play online and in-game behaviours in the virtual world of Azeroth, focuses on the
relationships between players’ self reported motives and their actual in-game behaviours. The
results demonstrate that ‘younger players appeared to be more motivated by advancement in
the game than older players were’ and ‘both male gender and young age were related to a
greater proneness to look for competition in the game, whereas female gamers and older
players showed a greater interest in the discovery and the exploration of WoW’. It can be
interesting to connect this result with our analysis. Indeed, the study about Gender differences
27 in mediated communication by Amanda M.Kimbrough, Rosanna E. Guadagno, Nicole L.
Muscanell, Janeann Dill (2013) shows a new trend which reports that women connect more
than men. According to the first study led on gender in the overall Internet use, we notice a
paradoxical situation. Some results assert that there are no gender differences in terms of
connecting (Fallows, 2005). According to these research studies, men and women differ in
their motivation and use of time spent online.
Weiser (2000, 2001) reports than men use Internet to read news and to play games and
women more to use it more for interpersonal communication.
To the ‘Gender differences in mediated communication: Women connect more than do men’
study (Kimbrough, Guadagno, Muscanell, Dill, 2013), women are found to be more frequent
mediated communication users. Women use text messaging, social media, and online video
calls more frequently than men.
For instance, Facebook counts 57% of female users and 43% are male users. Given that
social networks facilitate communal social interaction motivations, women are at the
forefront of this technology (Taylor, 2009).
These observations about gender differences are also found in other online virtual
environments. For instance, Guadagno et al. (2011) show that in Second life women commit
more in social interaction activities, such as meeting people and shopping, and men prefer
activities such as building and owning things.
That is why we believe it is important to connect this trend with the fact that women are more
present in multiplayer online gaming platforms such as WoW, although they may not be as
numerous as men to invade this world. Yet, as Muscanell and Guadagno (2012) show it,
women are using mediated technology to connect more and more with people. Therefore,
female gamers present an increasingly relevant social group for our work.
Furthermore, it appears in the study about self-reported motivation to play online, that
motivations are logically relied to the type of servers chosen by the players. Indeed, gamers
playing on PvP servers were motivated by competition, whereas PvE servers gamers were
more interested in discovering a new universe and did not subscribe for competition. The
opposite relation was found in people playing on PvE servers. On the other hand, the study
shows that relationship and socialization, as motivation factors, are more often linked to a
28 guild. Guilds allow players to be immersed in a social atmosphere. They can also group and
raid easier and obtain more rewards. Maybe, this kind of motivations confirms the results
found by Chen, Sun and Hsieh (2008), which highlighted the fact that guilds gathered
competition-oriented players and were often created for the purpose of short-term objectives
and rapidly dissolved of deserted by their members.
Thus, we can observe two kinds of motivations: socialization and competition. Theses results
may also be added to the gender differences in mediated communication.
2.4. The motivations of players: divergences according to gender
D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee (2009) examined how the players position
themselves in the game world in relation to their gender. Yet, this study aims at identifying
and understanding the reasons to play games, and explore the considerations women have for
online activities. Indeed, ‘Video games have consistently been portrayed as a male activity’
(McQuivey, 2001), however the number of women now playing online games would seem to
indicate a shift. As it is currently conceived, gender roles theories suggest that girls and
women would not find in games an attractive pastime, and if they did decide to play, they
would be deviating from traditional gender roles and activities. So are women using MMOs
and deviating from gender roles simply to commit in a new leisure activity traditionally
reserved for boys and men, or might they be using them for traditional female goals? As
stated earlier, MMO games are social in nature, which is a draw for many players, male and
female’ (D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009, 703).
In the world of MMOs, the motivations to play are often due to social reasons. The MMO
games are suitable spaces to social relations between players who have the same interests.
Indeed, ‘participating in MMO games offers players opportunities to interact with alikeminded others, including family and friends who play, as well as individuals met online’ ((D.
Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009, 703). Moreover, as noted M. Oliver & D.
Carr (2009, 449), the ‘first contact with the game came from one of two sources: either prior
knowledge of similar games (e.g., having played another MMORPG) or by being introduced
to it by someone already known to the participant (typically, in this case, a partner). Several
participants described having introduced other people to the game; playing was spread by
personal recommendation’.
However, players’ motivations are different according the gender. Indeed, ‘Female gamers—
29 both young and old—who play frequently believe that games can be valuable spaces for
socializing, including playing with friends and family as well as meeting new people via
games’ (D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009, 702) whereas ‘men play for
more achievement-oriented reasons’ (D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009,
p704; Yee, 2009).
But, gendered is a also a moderator ‘by factors such as age’ (Malcom, 2003) and ‘selfstereotyping’ (Gallacher & Klieger, 2001), suggesting that gender is dynamic and can depend
on things such as age, life situation, or race. Such findings paint a picture of a society where
gender roles remain entrenched, although others appear to be shifting, at least at certain times
or in particular contexts’ (D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009, 703).
3. Female gamers in MMORPGs and their social presence by using avatars
3.1. Avatars and identification
The interactions between the players are possible through the use of avatar, its evolution in
the game space and the degree of identification of the player with his avatar. In the context of
virtual worlds, the identification of user with her/his avatar depends on the level of interest of
the consideration for the communities or the organization. Indeed, some users may identify
with their avatars as a part of themselves; whereas in many cases, avatars in virtual worlds
can be quite different from how their users really look. This identification with the avatar
may be determined by an idealistic image of oneself. In addition, ‘the attractiveness of an
avatar may be enhanced (decorated and beautified) through various virtual items’ (C. Kim et
al., 2012, 1665). This implies that the attractiveness of the avatar has a role in the user’s
identification. Indeed, the latter want to be like or act like a character. Hoffner and Buchanan
(2005) define this concept as a ‘wishful identification’. Indeed, the user wants to emulate the
character to use this role model for future action or identity development or to imitate a
particulate behaviour in situation.
Furthermore, the identification of players to their avatars could be twofold: either the avatar
is part of themselves or an idealized version of them even. Thus, self-representation in the
game and the choice of the avatar would be underlying to the attractiveness of the character.
30 Also, the identification of the user's avatar plays a role in interpersonal relationships within a
virtual community. In fact, ‘user’s identification with their avatar had considerable influence
on efficacy and trust’ (C. Kim et al., 2012, 1665). Thus, we can consider that the design of
avatars and their visual characteristics have a significant role in determining the players’
social presence in the virtual communities of WoW.
In their study, R.A. Dunn et R. E. Guadagno (2011) examined the influence of the gender, the
importance of the personality (thanks to the Big 51) and the self-esteem on virtual selfrepresentation in the form of avatar self- discrepancy. The study was conducted among 174
participants who play the video game Neverwinter Night 2. This study shows that there is a
link between gender, player’s personality and the choice of her/his avatar. In fact, it ‘indicates
strong connection between people’s selection of avatars as a mean of self-representation and
impression management’ (R.A. Dunn, R.E. Guadagno, 2011, 104). Generally, players choose
avatars that differ from themselves but which correspond to social norms. However, the
physical characteristics of an avatar are important and depend on whether the player is a man
or a woman. The three most important aspects of the avatar, to the player, are the size, the
skin tone and the attractiveness. Indeed, the results of the study show ‘gender was a
significant predictor for differences in girth, chests, and heights. (…) Women did design
avatar bodies that were less bulky (…) men selected bulkier avatar’ (R.A. Dunn, R.E.
Guadagno, 2011, 104). The personality of the player has an impact on the choice of the
character and on the way to represent oneself. These effects also show differences in
relevance to gender. Dunn and Guadagno’s research points to the following personal traits:
-­‐
Agreeableness: the more agreeable male players want to conform to the idea that
society ‘would value a big, muscular and masculine avatar’ (Dunn and Guadagno,
2011, 104) and similarly, the more agreeable female players ‘may not to be selecting
smaller avatars as a means of reducing body bulk, which would be well within the
line of the thin ideal’ (Dunn and Guadagno, 2011, 104; also Harisson, 2000; Harisson
& Cantor, 1997).
-­‐
Openness: this study shows that there is a strong link between openness and avatar
design. Open-minded players feel more connected with their avatars. In addition,
1 The Big Five personality traits are five vast domains to study human personality. This theory developed by
Golberg in 1990, based on the Five Factor Model. The Big Five factors are agreeableness, openness,
conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. 31 they use easier the word ‘we’ for describe themselves and their avatars. Often, openminded players say ‘their avatars shared their personalities’ (Dunn and Guadagno,
2011, 104). To sum up, ‘they may naturally see their avatar as a true extension of
themselves’
-­‐
Conscientiousness: the study shows that the most conscientious people create avatars
that resemble them.
-­‐
Extraversion: The players who are introverted select attractive avatars. Indeed,
‘creating more attractive avatar can be seen as an effort to reach out, to attract more
social interaction’
-­‐
Neuroticism: neuroticism ‘served as a moderator for the effect of gender on avatar
attractiveness’. Neurotic women want to present themselves in the best way possible.
-­‐
Self-esteem: Self-esteem plays a role in the creation of the avatar. According to the
study, players with a lower self-esteem choose avatars, which are different from them.
For example, in this research ‘people with low self-esteem were more likely to pick
darker skin tones relative to their actual skin tones and to those people with high selfesteem (…) it is reasonable that people with low self-esteem may compensate for pale
skin in such way (R.A. Dunn, R.E. Guadagno, 2011, 106). In the same manner, a
female gamer with a low self-esteem could represent herself with a totally different
female body in relation with visual aesthetic criteria. This mechanism could be
analysing as compensation for this kind of female players.
The results of Dunn and Guadagno’s study show that people use avatar as way of selfrepresentation, and they often choose their avatars to compensate for their own personalities.
However, gender and personality can be moderators ‘to what has been the assumption that
people always try to present themselves in the most positive light if afforded the opportunity
to do so in a mediated-communication environment’ (R.A. Dunn, R.E. Guadagno, 2011,
105). Therefore, there is a strong link between the gamer’s personality, the gender and the
perception of the other on the creation of the avatar. Indeed, personality is a significant
moderator on gender effect in the avatar’s selection and creation.
We can use the results of this study and apply them, with nuance, in our own research on the
game WoW. Indeed, we can say that the choice of an avatar varies with the gender of the
32 player and her/his personality. However, these two variables, when combined together, could
have a role either as differentiation or as a moderator in the choice of the avatar.
3.2. Virtual Communities
In virtual communities, users share more or less the same common interests and goals. The
virtual community, as an organization pushes the individual to find a group and interact with
others. Besides, participating in virtual communities is a way to have a social support. The
degree of social support plays a role in the identification of users to the community. The user
finds gratification by the interactions with others in a mediated environment. According to
the C. Kim et al, ‘in virtual worlds, users want to be connected with other users who can
provide them understanding and emotional support’ (C. Kim et al., 2012, 1664). Moreover, in
MMORPGs, players have the possibility of gathering in teams and guilds, to carry out joint
missions, meet in institutions in the game (for example, bank and auction rooms), and in
virtual cities, interact (chat), compete and collaborate. Martin Oliver & Diane Carr (2009)
realised a study to understand how MMORPG, like World of Warcraft, could be a learning
space. The study was conducted among couples to explore what has been learned and how it
was taught but also ‘ to manage the potential complexity of studying social settings: couples
were the simplest stable social formation that we could identify who would interact both in
the context of the game and outside of this too’ (Oliver & Carr, 2009, 446). The two
researchers based on the concept of 'resource management' (Carr & Oliver, 2008), which are
divided into three points: ‘ludic (concerning the skills, knowledge and practices of game
play), social and material (concerning physical resources such as the embodied setting for
play)’. Oliver & Carr (2009) points to the importance of the ludic function for informal
leaning. Players learn with exchanges of gaming experience. This demonstrates that the
virtual space of the game is also a learning space.
3.3. Female avatars and sexism in game spaces
Brian Christopher Hardison studies the case of the game ‘EverQuest’ in Coding gender:
Performance and gender identity in a Synthetic world. This MMORPG offers many
corresponding steps similar to WoW during character creation. In fact, players can choose a
race, a gender, adjust its appearance (with limits of this program), choose a class and select a
33 name. This video game is also derived from the world of Tolkien and the fantasy tradition.
We can therefore deduce that the cultural references are the same.
In EverQuest 2, male bodies are muscular and show in very good physical condition. Bodies
are well shown as ‘athletic’. ‘The male avatars are also designed and coded to walk and run
with a normal human gait’ (B.C. Hardisson, 2012, p5). Clothes of the male characters are
archetypes according to the chosen class (cloth for mage for example). However, the choices
of clothing are neutral for the male characters. Indeed, ‘the standard non-armour consists of a
short-sleeved shirt, pants, and boots’. It seems that clothing for male characters are
‘unremarkable, non sexual, and in keeping, for the most part, with real worlds expectations of
male attire’ (B.C. Hardisson, 2012, p6).
Instead, women's bodies and clothing are presented in erotic with sexualized clothing. Like
the man character, the female avatars present ‘as being in superb physical shape’ but ‘they
tend to be shorter and less muscular’ (B.C. Hardisson, 2012, p6). Moreover, the female
characters are designed with a way walking with a catwalk model. Concerning the cloths,
‘the standard option is best described as having long, gathered sleeves, a closely fitted bodice,
and full skirt reminiscent of forms of medieval attire’ (B.C. Hardisson, 2012, p7). However,
there is not difference between the genders in term of power. In addition and according to
Castronova, the avatar seems to be an extension of the player. It’s the extension of the body
into the virtual space. Indeed, ‘the body is the tool by which the mind receives sensation and
manipulates the environment’ (E. Castranova, 2005, p 45). The connection between the
player’s body and the avatar is important. Thus, this connection can be the way to inscribe
the gender in the game world and reinforce the gender stereotypes. Thus, the psychological
bond between the real and the synthetic world is formed with the use of the avatar. This
notion is ‘harmful to women as it reinforces and perpetuates highly sexist attitudes and it
represses men do not adhere to culturally excepted performances of masculinity’ (B. C.
Hardisson, 2012, p13).
It is interesting to study how the characters are designed in World of Warcraft. If the female
avatars are designed like in EverQuest II, the difference between genders are more marked.
In addition, the representation of the woman’s body (proportions, clothes, perception of the
avatar by the male player) can be presented with eroticism and meet the expectations of male
players.
34 3.4. The avatar: towards a notion of non-gender?
Donna Haraway in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,2 defines the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a
hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a worldchanging fiction’ and continues by ‘The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has
no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to
organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher
unity’ (D. Haraway, 1991). With the Cyborg metaphor Haraway shows that things, which
seem natural, like the human body, are not: the representations are built by our ideas about
them. This idea has some interest in feminism, to the extent that women are often reduced to
the body itself.
According to Haraway (1991), there is not notion of domination and individuality in the
world of cyborg. The model of the family is non-existent; there is no waiting heterosexuality
(questioning of heterosexuality as a social norm). With notions of class, race and gender that
are imposed by social construction, we all belong to complex categories. Thus, ‘There is
nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as
'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific
discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement
forced on us by the terrible historic experience of the contradictory social realities of
patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism’. Haraway questions the sexual embodiment with the
invention of the cyborg: ‘Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound
historical breadth and depth.’
Moreover, communication technologies are crucial tools that redefine the body. For all
women, these tools challenge a new type of social relations. We can therefore deduce that the
reconstitution of the body redefined the way of thinking the body in virtual space. According
to Haraway (1991), the boundaries between man and machine are increasingly erased.
Indeed, ‘It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding
practices’. Yet ‘bodies are maps of power and identity’. Cyborg and are subject to the same
phenomenon of the importance of the body. The machine is a part of the human embodiment.
2
Donna Haraway, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991)
35 They are responsible for their operation, their place. Thus, we can extrapolate this theory and
conclude that we are responsible for our avatars; we practice the power over them.
The virtual space offers the possibility for everyone to create a different virtual body from the
biological one. In this way, the biological gender (understood either male or female), framed
by social norms, is the source of the dual male / female - dominated / dominant. Thus, the
virtual avatar as an image of yourself (and as an extension of self) may be closer to the
cyborg. Haraway redefines gender in a context of new global identity. Through the avatar,
everyone can choose the metaphor, the incarnation, the representation itself. The choice is not
biologically or socially established. Thus, the gender ratio is different here. The identity
fluctuates. It challenges the boundaries of the genre or even the role of the body in gender of
virtualization.
4. A semiotic approach to gendered bodies in MMORPGs
4.1. Connoted avatar, denoted avatar
World of Warcraft offers to evolve into a fantasy world through characters that are the result
of the creation of players.
This creation of the avatar is part of the first step before starting to play. The avatar is loaded
with meaning potentials because beyond the fact that it represents the fictional players’ alter
ego, other players also interpret it through interactions.
Each step of creation that offers Wow gives new meanings to the avatar. Therefore, the
personal and social significance of this avatar is intentional and one of a kind. To understand
how the avatars are designed as meaningful signs, we employ a similar approach to Roland
Barthes’ (1986) examination of the rhetoric of the image. According to him, everything is a
sign, thus: an object, an image, an advertisement, an individual, all these things can convey
several messages.
In an online game such as World of Warcraft, when the player creates the avatar, it is
connoted by the sense that the creator wants to give him. This sense is itself, denoted through
other players’ representations.
However, the connotation has a specific goal of signification, which is the one produced by
the creator. But, that could be interpreted in different ways by the receptors.
36 All signs are composed of a signified and a signifier. Both cannot be read separately. The
signified stands for the mental representation of a thing, and the signifier is the linguistic tool
used to designate that thing.
For instance, in the context of the game World of Warcraft, the players will perceive the
signifier differently than people who are external to the game. In fact, the creation of the
avatar in World of Warcraft proposes a lot of signs that can be found in all the characteristics
that players could choose (i.g. race, sex, class). These characteristics influence the final
avatar in its strength, power and capacity to interact. Therefore, they have a direct
contribution to the making of avatar as a social and semiotic object of study.
Thus, as Roland Barthes says, the signs can be understood thanks to cultural knowledge, and
refer to signifieds that are all global and one of a kind.
Indeed, the message or the sense influenced by individual’s perception and experience. To
Roland Barthes:
‘(…) the number of readings of the same lexia (of the same image) varies according to
individuals (...) it depends on the different kinds of knowledge invested in the image
(practical, national, cultural, aesthetic knowledge)’.
Following Barthes, we will explore different interpretations with reference to each avatar in
our analysis. Thus, we understand that all signs are systems of denotations and connotations.
These systems can be understood in terms of paradigms. Paradigms are the semiotic systems
in which we rationalize the world. They are socially and culturally generated systems of
signifying meaning, and they can be specific to each community.
For example, we will introduce a female player who chooses a dwarf as her avatar because
this choice is her strategy to hide her femininity behind this avatar by representing ugliness.
On the contrary, the receivers (other players) can interpret it differently (for example as a
strategy of competition).
To sum up, ‘the image, in its connotation, would thus be constituted by an architecture of
signs drawn from a variable depth of lexicons (of idiolects), each lexicon, however ‘deep’,
remaining coded’, Roland Barthes (1986). Nevertheless, our analysis considers the female
avatars in virtual space as the lexia, which is composed of many signs. These signs
correspond to a body of ‘attitudes’. It means that individuals have ‘idiolect’ (a specific
reading way for each person). In our analysis of avatars as a sign systems, we will use
players’ interviews to uncover exactly these different readings and how they come to life.
37 4.2. Communication and representation in virtual social contexts
The game space is considered as an area of interaction and communication. However, if we
consider that the game is a place where everything is a sign, we can also say that the avatar is
a combination of signs. According to Gunther Kress (2010), all ‘communication is
multimodal’. Communication can also use different media. Therefore, it is not only produced
by verbal discourse. The generation of multimodal discourse also uses other senses and
gestures.
In the traditional model of the communication process between two interlocutors, a link
happens in the form of a dyadic structure. This perspective is based on the schema of
Shannon and Weaver (1948) and Saussure, who also implies the role of social interactions.
The first person initiates a message and the second, after the reception, gives a feedback. The
sender codes a message, which will be decoded by the receiver. Despite the fact that this
theory of communication dominated the field during the late 20th century, it still describes the
receiver as passive.
To understand the relationship between gender (an avatar) and relations in WoW, Stuart
Hall’s theory of coding - decoding is relevant. According to Stuart Hall, the production in the
media is governed by a set of practices resulting from the social relations of production. The
product takes the shape of a speech obeying to codes, which allows to give language its
meaning and signification. This is the coding. The discourse circulates in the public sphere
and is distributed to different audiences. At first the message is received. Then, the speech
adapts to social practices, and it is transformed into a new sense. This is the decoding.
In order to understand the importance of the choice of the avatar in gaming experience, it is
important to understand that the message conveyed by the avatar has an impact on the game
experience. The method of the “Coding-Decoding” allows us to analyze how are interpreted
the “signs" (in the epistemological sense) and messages in the universe of WoW.
Yet, participants in a communication process use various resources to create meaning, to
demonstrate engagement and to improve their communications. In a perspective of collective
meaning construction, signs would be made and remade in cultures, Gunther Kress (2010).
Indeed, like in a virtual community, ‘members of a community participate in the renewing,
38 the remaking and the transformation of their social environment from the perspective of
meaning’. The interpretation and the ‘recalibration’ are the base of a new meaning. In this
way, the social is the motor of the semiotic change with a perpetual construction and
production of the meaning. Thus, ‘communication is the response to a prompt; and that
communication happens only when there is ‘interpretation’ Gunther Kress (2010). Thus, in
exchange, the receiver decodes a message; it negotiates the meaning, and creates a new one.
For an optimal communication and to create interactions, the interest of the receiver has a
primordial role. Indeed, the interest triggers an attention and engagement mechanism. Then,
the receiver will select, format and create a new meaning. The sign will become more
complex and its meaning potentials will be enriched, Gunther Kress (2010).
However, it is necessary to establish a distinction between our uses of the words
communication of representation:
-­‐
The representation is based on interest and engagement. It helps to understand the
world in which the individual finds himself with his own understanding. Indeed, the
representation ‘is focused on me, shaped by my social histories, by my present social
place, by my focus to give material form through socially available resources to some
element in the environment’.
-­‐
Communication is the need to produce a representation so that it can be understood by
everyone in order to obtain interaction. In fact, communication ‘is focused on social
(inter-)action in a social relation of me with others, as my action with or for someone
else in a specific relations of power’ Gunther Kress (2010).
In addition, according to Kress (2010), representation takes place in social environment;
whereas communication constructs a social environment. The two processes are produced by
social interactions and happen in a social environment, such as a virtual community. Since
communication constructs the social environment, the representations that are used in these
environments may vary according to the social context. Representation of oneself consists in
having interest in communicating with others. The self-representation that one gives is
meaningful. The avatar makes sense to its creator. It builds communication through
interpretation in the game. Then we can question the place of the avatar in the mechanism of
representation and communication. Designing his avatar, the player will make use of
resources that will be represented in the game world. The avatar, understood as a system of
signs, is a vector of a message. It could be, at first, how to represent oneself in order to
39 understand the place in the game world but also the means to introduce oneself to others for
social interaction. The interpretation of the message sent by the player through his avatar will
be interpreted and reinterpreted. The significance of its design by the player will be different
from the interpretation of other players. So we can say that the avatar has an important role in
social interaction within the game world, in the semiotic way to represent oneself and in
communication.
4.3. The signs system and the embodied experience in the game
According to Gunther Kress (2010), ‘the core unit of semiotics is the sign, a fusion of form
and meaning’. In addition, ‘all signs are metaphors’. We can consider, even from the literal
definition of the Avatar (as a metaphor, representing God on earth), that it is a metaphorical
extension of the player. It is an incarnation of the gamer in the virtual world (or in the game
world). It is the mean to interact with others in virtual communities, but it also sends a
message, simply through the mechanism of representation and interpretation. Thus, the place
of the body in game space is crucial because it is the first way to be represented, interpreted
and to interact with other players.
To understand the importance of the
virtual body in the establishment of
the identity in the game WoW, it is
essential
to
conduct
semiotic
analyzes of different avatars created
by players in the cyberspace. To
conduct these analyzes, Charles Sanders Pierce’s Sign Theory about signification,
representation, reference and meaning will be used.
According to Pierce, the sign is
composed by three components: The representamen, which denotes the object (object of
thought) through the interpretant (a mental representation of the relationship between the
object and the representamen). For example: if we talk about a dog, the word ‘dog’ is the
representamen, the object is what is referred to by the word, and the first interpretation is that
we share the definition of the word: the concept of dog. However, Pierce distinguishes the
Immediate object (the object as represented in the sign) and the Dynamic object (which is
what the sign can not directly express, because the receiver interprets it with his own
40 experience). Similarly, it distinguishes the Immediate interpretant, (a probable meaning)
which is likely to pop into the receiver’s mind who knows the code, the Dynamic interpretant
(the special meaning formed in the mind of the receiver) and the Final interpretant, meaning
that all of the receivers can agree. This process of interpretation is called Semiosis. With the
process of semiosis, we can observe the creation of a new sign.
According to Kress, ‘in the reception of a sign the materiality of modes interacts with the
physiology of bodies’. If we consider that the avatar is the extension of the player’s body, the
action and the behaviour of the avatar can be understood like ‘parallel performance for
myself’, a ‘visible performance’. The gesture, the implied feelings and the actions of an
avatar in the virtual space commit the player. But, the role of the environment in the process
of semiosis is important. The representation and the interpretation of the body is different in
the virtual space because the interpretation varies following to the context. In the game
WoW, the player can be an orc, an elf, a human and a lot of other fantastic creatures. Thus,
the interpretation of this extension of the body by the other player is linked with the semiosis
because players in a game context, play in a fantasy world. In addition, ‘no sign remains, as it
were, simply or merely a ‘mental’, ‘conceptual’, a ‘cognitive ressource’’. Sign is always
associated to the reality. The identity is linked to the gesture. So, the identity cannot be only
reduced to a mental concept. In this way, ‘identity is embodied and becomes more than a
merely mental phenomenon, an ‘attitude’, maybe, that I display or perform’ Gunther Kress
(2010). The sign will also be linked to the context, have a ‘stance in the world’ and will be
supervised by the interest of the sign maker. There is therefore a crucial duality between form
and meaning, framed by the subjectivity of the producer of the sign.
Thus, the choices that lead to the creation of an avatar are important. For example, a player
can choose a female elf or a male dwarf, as far as the mental concept of the avatar is
embodied from aesthetic and performative characteristics. The body notion is also linked to
gender notion with a logical representation. The sign producer in the game may choose his
gender as a characteristic of his avatar. This results from a choice, which is a semiotic
process. The reception of this sign, as the embodiment of the body, can be interpreted
according to specific cultural norms in the context of the game which has a specific logic of
representation.
41 Methodology
Semiotic analysis (of avatars) supported by phenomenological insights (interviews)
We articulated our methodology (semiotic analysis and qualitative approach), following to
the testimonies of both male and female gamers. Indeed, we needed insights on the way
women appropriated the male game space and men’s opinions about the evolution and the
perception of female gender in the game, visually and within social interactions.
1. Qualitative approach
As it was specified above, the research that we are leading is a semiotic approach to gender
studies in multiplayer online gaming. To understand how women create their virtual bodies in
order to visually represent their identities, and how their virtual identities affect the way they
play the game, we chose to collect testimonies thanks to qualitative interviews. The former is
presented as the semiotic analyses of the players’ avatars as multimodal signs. The latter will
indeed offer us a higher precision in terms of gamers’ feelings about their way of playing.
Therefore, 10 face-to-face interviews were performed. However, since we faced problems by
reaching our contacts, which were mostly located in France, 7 out of the 10 interviews were
actually done via Skype. Our target audience is then composed of five male and five female
gamers. It seems relevant to us to linger on both men and women’s gaming experience, since
men’s opinion about female avatars will be able to provide us a better understanding of the
representation of women’s virtual identities in games. Besides we also plan to analyze the
consideration of the issue of gender, for instance, when men choose to play the game by
using a female avatar.
Our aim is not to generalize the personal traits of all female Wow players with our analysis
but rather to give insight analyses of a few qualitative cases through three
pillars: the gamer’s habitus, the gamer’s avatar and the gaming experience. The gamer’s
habitus part will try to go deeper in the gamer’s personal environment, namely we will try to
determine which role plays WoW in their life and what led them to play this game in
particular. Then, in second part of the analysis that is about gamers’ avatars, called the
construction of gender, we will attempt to emphasize and understand the construction of
42 gender in the building process of a virtual identity. And eventually, in the part about gaming
experience that will be titled the influence of gender in the game, we aim to uncover and
understand the influence of gender in the context of the game’s social environment.
Besides, we agree with Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) Grounded Theory approach, as they claim
when a qualitative study is led, the number of informant is of less importance. Indeed the
establishment of a nomenclature in order to understand results does not require a large group
of interviewees since the number of informants participating in a qualitative research does not
necessarily correspond to the population and therefor cannot be generalized to it. If the
selection is convenient, efficient and gathers the needed criteria to try to help answer the
research question, a small number of interviewees can be adequate, especially if one
particular group is studied. (Esaiasson and al, 2002). Our interview participants show
similarities and variations in terms of their game-play habits and interests so they could
provide us with several different perspectives to our discussions on gender construction in
avatars. This is the reason why we think a group of ten people is enough to observe and
study.
2. Visual data: semiotic analysis
We will start by analysing in details our interviewees’ avatars, by asking them about how
they chose to elaborate it and what their specific choices meant to them. This work will help
us understand the way people build their virtual identities and give us insights about the
meaning of choosing one character over another, as well as different gaming options that will
be transcribed into different assets. For instance, when your avatar is stronger in a particular
area there are high chances for it to be weaker somewhere else. Question is, how do you
decide which strengths and which weakness your avatar should evolve with. And what are
the impacts of such choices.
The semiotic focuses on the sign's intent and convention. It also focuses on the relation
between signs and the objects they stand for.
As we stated previously, everything can be defined as a system. Through semiotic analysis,
realized on female gamers avatars, we dissect these systems. We are analyzing avatars
created in WoW and their attributed perception. These observations will allow us to consider
the social functions of the chosen avatars.
43 It is important to look at these images because they are carrying many significations. Those
are the results of the influence of three factors. Firstly, we linger on the meaning given by the
person who creates an avatar. Secondly, the shared meaning between the designer and the
reader of the sign, here the avatar. And finally, we study one's interpretation. The avatar
created by a player, on wow for instance, is important to understand how they represent
themselves. Indeed, the representation is a way for the player to personify a character. This
representation serves the comprehension of players’ inner selves in the world. It is therefore
meaningful.
Yet, the representation is also productive of communication and interpretation. According to
Judith Butler (1990) gender is an element allowing one to read, understood. It is a selfpresentation for the other. The player presents himself through his virtual body. By choosing
specific physical characteristics, players construct the sense, like a message intended to other
players. The choice of the race, class and gender participate to the construction of this
representation in the way that characteristics are related to the avatar’ performance. But it is
important to understand that these choices arise from a narrative system such as mythology or
the story of each class. These characteristics create a virtual body, which allows the player to
interact with others players in the semiosis mechanism (Peirce, 1978).
Thus, the avatar conveys a certain representation because it is the result of a combination of
signs. The creation of a new representation will be based on player’s reception of the sign
system.
The avatar’s representation is constructed according to the norms of the space it evolves in
(the universe of Wow). The different signs and the multiple interpretations interact together
but also contradict each other. But, through this mechanism, signs are shaped in this virtual
world by their own representations.
The semiotic focuses on the sign's intent and convention. It also focuses on the relation
between signs and the objects they stand for. As we stated previously, everything can be
defined as a system. Through semiotic analysis, realized on female gamers avatars, we
dissect these systems. We are analyzing avatars created in WoW and their attributed
perception. These observations will allow us to consider the social functions of the chosen
avatars.
44 It is important to look at these images because they are carrying many significations. Those
are the results of the influence of three factors. Firstly, we linger on the meaning given by the
person who creates an avatar. Secondly, the shared meaning between the designer and the
reader of the sign, here the avatar. And finally, we study one's interpretation. The avatar
created by a player, on wow for instance, is important to understand how they represent
themselves. Indeed, the representation is a way for the player to personify a character. This
representation serves the comprehension of players’ inner selves in the world. It is therefore
meaningful.
Yet, the representation is also productive of communication and interpretation. According to
Judith Butler (1990) gender is an element allowing one to read, understood. It is a selfpresentation for the other. The player presents himself through his virtual body. By choosing
specific physical characteristics, players construct the sense, like a message intended to other
players. The choice of the race, class and gender participate to the construction of this
representation in the way that characteristics are related to the avatar’ performance. But it is
important to understand that these choices arise from a narrative system such as mythology or
the story of each class. These characteristics create a virtual body, which allows the player to
interact with others players in the semiosis mechanism (Peirce, 1978). Thus, the avatar
conveys a certain representation because it is the result of a combination of signs. The
creation of a new representation will be based on player’s reception of the sign system.
The avatar’s representation is constructed according to the norms of the space it evolves in
(the universe of Wow). The different signs and the multiple interpretations interact together
but also contradict each other. But, through this mechanism, signs are shaped in this virtual
world by their own representations.
45 Analysis of avatars and gaming experiences
1. Presentation of gamers
The ten informants we selected for our study were all students. All of our informants are from
France because we had existing contacts; therefore we had easier access and communication
with the French gamers’ communities. Five of them were female players the five others were
male players. One of the men was a casual gamer whereas three of the girls considered
themselves as such. Thus, the 6 others considered themselves to be hardcore gamers.
Female gamer number 1 (FG1) comes from France and currently studies communication in
Denmark, she is 22 years old and has been playing casually for 5 years. She owns one male
avatar that she shared with her boyfriend on a common account that they use together. Her
avatar is a male night elf.
Female gamer number 2 (FG2) also comes from France and is currently training to be a
nurse. She is 23 years old and has been playing casually for 6 years. She created only one
avatar as well, which is a thief bloody elf.
Female gamer number 3 (FG3) lives in France and currently studies communication. She is
23 years old and has been playing on a regular basis for 9 years. She considers herself as
addicted to the game. She possesses 7 avatars of different genders, races and classes. In the
study, she expressed the wish not to be represented by a human or a dwarf avatar.
Female gamer number 4 (FG4) lives in France and currently studies communication as
well. She is 23 years old and has been playing almost every day for 8 years. Her avatar is a
female human thief, and this is the only avatar she owns.
Female gamer number 5 (FG5) lives in France and currently studies to be a hairdresser. She
is 23 years old and has been playing casually for 8 years. Her only avatar is a female dwarf.
Male gamer number 1 (MG1) comes from France and currently studies computer science in
Denmark. He is 22 years old and has been playing on a daily basis for 3 years. His avatar is a
46 male long-haired zombie. This is the only avatar he plays with despite the fact that he created
several other characters.
Male gamer number 2 (MG2) lives in France and currently studies to be a paleontologist.
He is 24 years old and has been playing casually for 4 years. His unique avatar is a male orc.
Male gamer number 3 (MG3) lives in France and currently studies computer science in
Denmark. He is 22 years old and has been playing on a regular basis since he was 14 and
then stopped when he was 17 and has been a hard gamer for 5 years. Over all these years he
had several avatars. He was using female avatars during his first years of playing and then
male avatars. Now his avatar is a male troll.
Male gamer number 4 (MG4) lives in France and currently studies in a business school. He
is 24 years old and has been playing on a regular basis for 6 years. He built his only avatar
trying to represent what his imaginary hero could be. His avatar is a male tauren.
Male gamer number 5 (MG5) lives in France and currently studies computer science in
Denmark. He is 21 years old and has been playing everyday for one year and a half. His
avatar is a female dwarf.
In order to analyze and understand our informants’ gaming experiences and the role
they consider the gender plays in WoW, we decided to classify our results into three topics:
Players and their motivations, self-presentation by gendered virtual bodies and finally gender
and social interactions. The first section will outline the relations between the players’
personal and social environments and their reasons for playing the game. After the analysis of
their general motivations, the next section will move the focus to the visual semiotic analysis
of the avatars. We will outline the ways in which different players choose to represent their
gender identities visually in their game characters. Finally, the third section will focus on the
effects of their choices on their game-play experiences, and the ways in which socialize with
others in the game world. Therefore, the analysis combines the visual semiotic approach with
the analysis of social contexts within the social world of MMORPGs.
47 2. Players and their motivations
Both male and female gamers that we interviewed felt attracted by the medieval-fantasy
universe present in WoW, because they all had some previous experience of this kind before.
Indeed they had all played games in the same style before. These games were mostly League
of Legends, Diablo, Warcraft and other MMORPGs such as Starcraft and Counter Strike.
MG1 ‘I started playing because I was a big fan of Warcraft 3’
FG1 and FG3 ‘Before playing at WoW, I played at Diablo 2’
We first try to understand why women wanted to start playing this game and how they could
end up playing video games whereas it is mostly considered as a masculine space. Our
interviews showed that most players were initially influenced by social acquaintances, as they
were introduced to the game by either a friend, relative or loved one.
FG1 ‘When I met my boyfriend, I found myself in a MMORPGs gamers community
who used to have long discussions about these games, like Starcraft, WoW or Diablo,
so I wanted to discover why these different virtual spaces mattered that much to them.
It was also a way for me to share their passion and feel integrated’.
FG4 ‘I first started playing because my best friend introduced me to this game.’
These testimonies reveal that the offline social contexts can have a paramount influence on
the way people start playing. Especially in female gamers, this turned out to be an important
reason for discovering the game and start playing it. The life partner also has a influence in
the discovery of new experiences and interests. As shown in FG1 comment, this discovery
can often be motivated by social reasons outside the game, such as ‘feeling integrated’ to a
group or ‘sharing someone’s passion’. Indeed, previous research has shown that the ‘first
contact with the game comes from one of two sources in the case of playing at WoW: either
prior knowledge of similar games (eg, having played another MMORPG) or by being
introduced to it by someone already known to the participant (typically, in this case, a
partner)’ (Martin Oliver and Diane Carr, 2009, p449).
48 FG3 ‘I started to play because most of my friends are guys and were already playing.
At the beginning it was just a way of getting (sic) more integrated in the group, but I
really became addicted ’
In this case-scenario, it is interesting to notice that not only was FG3 influenced by her
friends to start playing the game but she also considers videogames as an exclusive masculine
space to begin with. And she is the one who penetrated into this masculine area to feel
integrated. Although gaming has consistently been portrayed as a male activity, previous
research has shown that the increasing number of women who play games would seem to
indicate a shift (McQuivey, 2001). Therefore, it can be safe to assume that there can be a shift
in female players’ motivations, rather than the need to feel integrated to a male-dominated
community. Indeed, our findings point to various other reasons of female players for enjoying
the game.
FG2 ‘I was first attracted to this game because the universe and the scenery. I just
loved the story of each category of characters, and the questing is really nice’.
Female gamers also seem to be sensible to graphics in game design. The spectacle and
variety of virtual environments in WoW’s design is another reason for its success in
attracting the female players.
Another significant motivation for WoW players is the chance to socialize by playing the
game, both in online and offline worlds. The multiplayer aspect of WoW seduces female
gamers who see the game as a mean to spend time with their friends and share a gaming
experience at the same time and together in the same room.
FG3 ‘I often play with my friends, we organize nights together to play together in the
same room with pizzas and drinks’
Besides ‘female gamers (…) who play frequently believe that games can be valuable for
socializing, including playing with friends and family as well as meeting new people via
games’ (D. Williams et al, 2009, 702; Royse, Lee, Undrahbuyan, Hopson and Consalvo,
2007; Yee, 2006). Female gamers are then strongly motivated by the social aspect of
49 multiplayer online games, they see it as a way to meet new people and spend more time with
their existing friends, experiencing the same game. Indeed ‘participating in MMO games
offers players opportunities to interact with like-minded others, including family and friends
who play, as well as individuals met online.’ (D. Williams et al, 2009, 703).
MG3 ‘I have always had a very mechanical vision of the game, improving my
personal skills is my main goal’
Unlike females, the main motivation of most male informant for playing WoW is to achieve
personal missions and improve their avatar’s strength. Social interactions do not seem to be a
factor of attractiveness to them, even if they may be able to enjoy it during the game, it did
not trigger their wish to start playing. Based on our analysis of 10 gamers, personal
achievements are the prior male motivation for creating and maintaining a virtual character in
WoW. Male gamers are also attracted to the game for its narrative complexity and the
possible improvements an avatar can gain thanks to achieving personal or team quests.
MG1 ‘I was mostly attracted to the Warcraft universe and by the huge complexity of
the game’
Yet, this assumption that men are more attracted to complexity and improvement than
women needs a critical feminist perspective. Indeed, ‘men play for more achievementoriented reasons’ (D. Williams, M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee, 2009, p704; Yee, 2009).
Even though it may turn out to be true, these gendered expectations are more and more
weakened as women penetrated the so-called masculine video gaming space and gradually
become a significant part of the virtual communities. Indeed, ‘we have seen a number of
women use MMOs, and with greater dedication and time commitment than men’ (D.
Williams et al, 2009, 720). IN FG3’s comments, it is possible to notice the profile of a
hardcore female gamer:
FG3 ‘A typical day is something like waking up around twelve, turning on my
computer to play until three or four in the morning’
Now we can also find female hard gamers who truly developed an addiction to the game and
make us question the traditional gendered expectations. Thanks to this kind of testimonies we
50 can assert that the boundaries of video gaming as an exclusively masculine space become
more and more blurred.
The impact of the surroundings and friends is determining in their approach to the game. The
differences between male and female players are mostly apparent when it comes to the
consideration of the game as a space to gratify personal needs and fulfill expectations.
Indeed, our initial assumption was that male gamers were more interested in the complexity
and the different levels of narrative evolution offered by the game, whereas girls were mostly
attracted by the social interactions and playing with friends. Eventually, these gender
differentiation hypotheses needed to be reconsidered, as our analysis showed that the gaming
space is getting more and more feminized thanks to the appearance of female hard gamers.
Therefore, our next section of analysis questions the ways in which this changing MMORPG
landscape allows women to present their interest in the game by creating gendered avatars as
their virtual bodies inside the game world.
3. Self-presentation by gendered virtual bodies
An avatar is the result of a transformation process. In video games, the avatar is the
representation of the player in action in the game world. It is designed as an intermediary
between two worlds: real life and game world. The gamer is the one who chooses how to
elaborate their avatar, by picking a gender, a race and a class in WoW. Our analysis in this
section primarily focuses on the ways on building such bridges between the two worlds by
making personal representations.
3.1. Identification through an avatar’s gender
We first tried to understand the reasons of the choice of gamers’ avatars. Our interviews with
male gamers has shown that their motivations for creating an male avatar can be motivated
by their own gender in the offline world, which shows that they have a specific way of
identifying themselves with their avatars.
MG1 ‘I wanted a male at first because I am a male (sic)’
51 ‘I was a young rebel metalhead (sic) with long hair, so I had no other choice
than (sic) making an undead with long hair’
MG2 ‘I chose a male avatar because I’m a boy’
Some of the male gamers do not really question themselves about their avatar’s gender,
namely it was revealed that that most of them needed to identify with their virtual bodies at
some point. Thus, they chose to create themselves male avatars because they are male
gamers. A similar tendency to self-representation and identification with the avatar is also
seen in the comments of female gamers.
FG2 ‘I systematically chose a female avatar so that I could find myself in her, and
also because of the aesthetics aspect, I did not like male characters’ design’
FG4 ‘When I chose my avatar I wanted to mirror myself, that is why I decided to play
with a female human thief because all these things seem like real life in WoW
universe’
FG5 ‘ I don’t see the point of this question. I took a girl because I am a girl’
These informants explain their need to see themselves in their avatars and reproduced their
gender in the building of their virtual body. This wish for identification may be explained by
different reasons. One of the female gamers (FG4) wished to visually represent herself in the
game because humans are the only real-life looking characters in this medieval-fantasy
universe and she needed some of her usual landmarks. Another one even considered the
question are frivolous because it was completely obvious to her to create yourself a virtual
identity that matches the most with your real life identity. A strong wish for identification is
then widely spread and we often face ‘strong connections between people’s selections of
avatars as a mean of self-representation’ (R.A. Dunn, R.E. Guadagno, 2012, 104). This
phenomenon may be a part of an identity development process when the desire to create a
similar virtual body could eventually end up, consciously or unconsciously, to have as much
affect on the gamer’s attitude that the gamer has on their avatar. As explained in our
theoretical section, Buchanan and Hoffner’s (2005) notion of ‘wishful identification’ can be
used to explain this phenomenon. Indeed, the user elaborates the avatar and develops certain
behaviors for identity building in the virtual world, while he/she reproduces some of his
attitudes about body and representation in the physical world.
52 Thus we were made to understand that virtual life is a place where personal construction also
has a chance to happen. Indeed, young people’s engagement with the Internet is equal to see
cyberspace as offering a ‘virtual bedroom’, especially for girls, ‘often emphasizing the
private or personal nature of online engagement’ (M.C. Kearney, 2011; Sarah Baker, 2011).
Gamers actually need to know that they can achieve something in life or in virtual life by
being themselves.
3.2. Beyond the gendered identification, the illustration of other choices
MG3 ‘I don’t think my avatars represent me visually or personally, I mostly chose my
characters appearances based on my tastes and what I found cool’
FG5 ‘My avatar (female dwarf) looks like a big cow! She is horrible and makes me
laugh so I like her a lot!’
The choice of an avatar and its gender do not automatically respond to a desire of
identification between the gamer and its virtual body. Indeed, the avatar’s main purpose is
not to represent oneself exactly but also answer and illustrate other criteria, such as what is
considered as ‘cool’ and other qualities like strength and bravery, but it can also have a
ridiculous appearance whose goal will be to entertain its owner and make him laugh while
they evolve together in the game. In some contexts, the avatar can be just a sexy image on the
screen, with which the user interacts to play the game, rather than a personal representation,
such as MG3’s comment below:
MG3 ‘My first characters were exclusively females since at the time I was o horny
hormone-raging teenager. Afterwards, I started maturing a bit and therefore started
to create more identifiable characters, mostly male trolls’
In this situation, the avatar has another function; it does not always respond to a desire of
self-identification. Adolescent and young adult males often use game spaces to explore their
masculinity and identity’ (Fox J., & Tang, 2013, 2; Jansz, 2005). Indeed, gender swapping in
virtual worlds has been used by young male players who did not know much about the other
53 sex. Using a female avatar then appeared as a solution to develop their sexual identity for
MG3. This gamer actually never really talked to girls in real life when he started to play at
WoW, and it was his only chance to have an interaction, an approach, with girls, even if it
was only a virtual one. ‘
FG3 ‘One of my characters was a very ugly undead female
(sic)(Figure 3), I decided to make it ugly and scary to really
fit to its nature. I did not care about having sexy female
characters? I just created characters with attributes and
personalities I would like to be if I was (sic) for real in the
game’
Another explanation for this gender swapping phenomenon is to
want one’s avatar’s characteristics to match the medieval-fantasy
universe they evolve in. this is a matter of accuracy and
consistency. Besides, in this case, the female gamer even goes
beyond this desire of consistency towards the codes of this specific
universe, she claims that she refused to be represented by a sexy
female human avatar which would have not matched at all with her
Figure 3. All rights
reserved.
personal idea of attractiveness. Indeed, her interpretation of avatar reflects the idea of using
‘the body’ as ‘the tool by which the mind receives sensations and manipulates the
environment’ (E. Castronova, 2005, 45). Thus, the avatar becomes an accurate tool to enter
this fantasy world, so the chosen avatars are built according to what would match the most to
such a particular universe.
FG3 ‘I have seven different characters, three of them were really to start and to
experience the game and to see what I like or not, the others are my real ones, the
ones I am more comfortable with. They are of different genders, races, and specialties
(…) my way of playing evolved’.
Gender swapping can also be established as a gameplay strategy. Indeed, this female gamer
has been using several characters from different genders, which led her to play strategically
differently each time. She tried several characters before finding the one she would feel more
54 comfortable with. What is important here is that in order to find her virtual identity, she had
to experiment different alternatives (different genders and different roles).
FG3 ‘I did not want to identify with myself but I wanted my avatar to be a character
in the game’.
Thus, it was made clear to us that self-identification was not the only aim in the creation of a
virtual identity embodied by a gendered body. Indeed, some gamers would experience gender
swapping so that they could discover and explore another gender and, in the case of male
gamers using female avatars, to confirm their masculinity by being in regular virtual contact
with female gender. Gender swapping can also illustrates a desire to fit into the universe of
the game, by elaborating a boorish avatar which does not match their true nature but would fit
into their own idea and conception of medieval-fantasy world. Eventually, creating an avatar
and not considering the gender as a paramount part of the identity, could also fall within a
gameplay strategy that would aim at finding which avatar fits the most to a gamer by trying
several of them before deciding. Indeed, when a gamer decides to try playing with several
characters of different genders, races and classes in order to discover which one they feel
more comfortable with to achieve quests and evolve during the game, it is considered as a
gameplay strategy.
4. Gender and social interactions
Gender is only one aspect in the multiple details we find in the creation of an avatar. When
we change the gender of an avatar, switching from female to male in the creation process, we
can notice that it does not have any affect on the character’s skills. Gender is then never
determining as regards the strength other qualities of an avatar. Thus, the choice of the gender
always ensues from other factors. The design of avatars then has many aspects, and gender is
only one of them, and objectively one the less relevant as regards skills. The meaning of the
gender then mostly appears when it comes to social interactions in the game.
FG4 ‘I use my femininity to reach my goals’
MG5 ‘If you make believe to frustrated guys that you are a girl, they will help you
and give you some stuff’
55 FG3 ‘I don’t think it (gender) really influence my way of gaming, the only thing it had
influence on was the fact that other players were more likely to help me’
MG2 ‘Some weird guys create girls to seduce other people’
In this case, gender is used to achieve missions and is a way to obtain what gamers need from
others, may it be conscientiously or not. Gender is seen and considered as a strong
manipulation tool by both male and female gamers who all experienced differences in their
gaming process when they were playing with female avatars or confronted to female avatars.
As we said it before, cultural stereotypes from real life are also reproduced in a virtual world.
The gaming universe is then not ruled by brand new cultural codes, but is a projection of
adapted stereotypes from real life. ‘Men act and women appear, men look at women, and
women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger, 1972).
FG3 ‘I realized that the gender of my character has an influence on the way I could
interact with other gamers. This is why I stopped playing with male avatars. When I
started to play, there were nicer and really much more helpful, they crafted me items
to help me to get stuffed, I had easier access to guilds, I was invited to raids and
dungeons. It really made me life easier in the game; being a girl playing with a girl
avatar opened me doors and helped me to create a strong and big network online.’
After noticing this situation, some gamers take advantage of it. FG 3 says she is aware of this
side of the game and knew that it would ease her life in the game. This is why she uses this
sexist situation to her benefit and only plays with female avatars now. Indeed, she declares
that it gave her easier access to guilds, eased her social access and offered her more
opportunities to improve her personal skills. Being aware of this special treatment and using
female avatars, not for what they can do but for what they represent, can also be considered
as a male-dominated perspective to female players.
Thus, women with female avatars do not really suffer from the simple fact of being a woman
in the game. Sexism is never quoted as being an issue for female gamers with female avatars.
They are other more important issues that change the way people play the game. Selecting
the gender is a visual detail in WoW, it does not change the character’s performance. Thus, if
there is sexism in the game, it certainly does not appear right away, but this a process that is
built within and along the game. As the comments above show, female avatars are also used
56 by female gamers to benefit from the influence their gender has in their social interactions.
People’s social interactions within the game also depends on their participation and their time
investment, as hardcore and casual gamers often express different sentiments about using
their avatars to meet others in WoW, as illustrated in FG5’s comment below:
FG5 ‘I think my way of interacting with others mainly depends on the character that I
have in front of me. I also think that hard gamers interact more with other people and
sometimes look for other people to talk to about their lives, their common passions,
because they have no one to do that with in the real world’
In FG5’s opinion, hard and casual gamers do not share the same consideration of the game.
Hard gamers spend larger amounts of time playing at WoW, and seize every chance they get
to interact with other gamers’ avatars. To casual gamers, it is not that crucial to be
extensively socially present in the game.
Discussion of findings
Our findings from the combination of semiotic analysis with player interviews have shown
that players have different motivations and personal relations with their avatars. Both male
and female players are attracted to WoW because of its high level of detail and the large
amount of choices that are offered as regards the creation of an avatar. This is not the only
common point between male and female gamers since both groups already had experienced
online gaming before, and used to play games such as Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2. It is then
revealed that WoW is a game complex and deep enough to attract and addict informed
gamers. Moreover, male and female gamers mostly share the same way of discovering WoW,
thanks to friends and relatives. In players’ appreciation of the game, the impact of the
entourage turns out to be determining.
Our results also showed that the major differences between male and female gamers appear
when it comes to the consideration of the game in terms of its level of seriousness and
intensity which accompany their gameplay. Indeed, men seem to be more attracted to the
complexity of WoW, namely its wide number of quests, missions, scenarios and characters,
as well as to the levels of evolution and the possibility of personal improvements. Unlike
57 men, most women first mention the social interaction aspect as an important asset of the
game. The possibility of playing with friends, both online and offline, is to the greatest source
of enjoyment in playing WoW for most of the female players.
Regarding the creation of the avatar itself, our results revealed that gender was not the main
guideline in the elaboration of a virtual identity. Indeed, people tend to create virtual bodies
to represent other aspect of their identities: the wish to discover another gender or even to
illustrate their own conception of qualities such as strength or bravery. Gender then appears
not to be the pillar in the definition of our identity in the virtual world. This is why avatars’
creation is also ruled by personal tastes and interests (i.e. men who want to look at female
bodies, or people who want to laugh and create the ugliest character possible to do so …)
Most players have experimented game-play with several characters, varying in terms of
gender, race and class. Gender swapping is then an important part in the elaboration of an
avatar since a matching gender from a gamer to their avatar does not stand a priority in the
avatar creation process. Gamers would rather emphasize other qualities. Elaborating an avatar
can also means create a character that fits into this medieval-fantasy world, and in that case a
troll or a dwarf are more convenient than a human shape. Swapping gender is even
sometimes a part of a gameplay strategy, when gamers use several genders and characters
before deciding on the one they feel more comfortable with n order to evolve in the game.
The matter of sexism that could ensue from these gendered questions, does not seem to be
felt as an issue from both female and male gamers. Indeed, in the avatar creation process, it is
noticeable that switching an avatar’s gender does not affect its skills in the game. Thus, the
gender never appears to be a criteria when it comes to define the strength or the power of a
virtual body. Gender seems rather to be taking its whole meaning when social interactions
within the game are broached. Indeed, gender then appears as a mean to reach goals and
achieve quests by gaining favors from another gender, may it be conscientiously or not. To
exemplify this, we have discussed how female players can receive treatments of favor from
the male players when they use their female avatars. This approach may be considered as
sexist, when gender is only used as a manipulation tool. Thus cultural stereotypes from real
life are also reproduced in virtual worlds. The gaming universe does not erase any usual
scheme of behaviors; people adapt their behaviors according to the need of the game
58 environment. Yet, sexism was not described as a serious issue by either male or female
gamers, who acknowledge that it exists but adjust to it by using it for their own benefit.
Thus, the main trends that were shown in our results is that the virtual world can also be a
place where the development of the gender identity operates on a complex system of social
and personal motivations, when young male gamers use female avatars to try to learn more
about femininity for instance. Identification and signification are then two important aspects
in the creation of an avatar, since no choice is random and always means something to the
gamer, depending on what they seek into the game and what the game itself can bring to their
personal development.
5. Analysis of avatars as gendered symbols
The analysis of self-presentation and gendered virtual bodies in this section also includes the
visual analysis of people’s avatars in WoW in order to understand what visual characteristics
of the avatars are thought to reflect their owners’ personalities and their interests in playing
the game. We will demonstrate our findings below by exemplifying the findings on two
different avatars owned by two of the female players.
FG2
`
Figures 1 & 2: Avatar of FG2 in World of Warcraft® (left) and FG2 in real life (right)
59 In the game World of Warcraft, this character represents an elf, although the avatar’s body
shape resembles a human. There are many visual signifiers that define how this character is
to be constructed as a meaningful avatar, including its race, class and gender. We can notice
that it is a blood elf because its hands are red. Furthermore, the dagger that it holds in its hand
means that it is a thief. In this screenshot, we can see that the character is a female avatar
thanks to the stereotypically beautiful shape of its body. Indeed, this character has long hair,
its facial features are fine, and its stomach is flat. This highlights the forms of her breast. The
character does not have many clothing. It wears a strapless shirt, which covers its chest. It is
wearing short covering tights. These are shaped like garters. However, the character will
collect new clothes and armor throughout the progression of the game, and these additions
will not only make it look different but also stronger and more agile. Similarly to male
players’ identification with male gendered avatars, as shown above, this female player choses
a female avatar to mirror her gender.
FG2 ‘I automatically took a girl to find a little bit of me in it.’
However, she indicates that besides the gender, she did not want to physically entirely
represent herself:
FG2 ‘I don’t seek any connection between my avatar and me, instead, I wanted to
create an avatar which had codes of beauty very different from mine.’
So she chose this avatar because the feminine aesthetic of the characters attracted her more
than males’. Besides, the choice of her avatar’s class was the most important criteria to her,
she did not mind about the design, even if this one was similar to thieves’ avatars, which are
relatively undressed most of the time.
Moreover, to some gamers, this thief elf is a part of a weaker race than others.
FG1 ‘I noticed that races can be perceived differently. (…) some characters are in my
opinion better seen than others. When I created my avatar, I was with a hard gamer
who advised me not to take the thief elf. To him, this race was less "strong" than
others and less well regarded by the gaming community.’
60 This first testimony clearly reveals that the message the creator of this avatar wants to convey
is different than its general reception. We are made to notice that the gamer elaborated her
avatar by using her own semiotic codes about beauty. This being said, we can deduce that her
beauty codes match an idealistic vision of women in the game. These codes are considered
idealistic in the extent that her female avatar appears to be highly sexualized, wearing tights,
a garter and a strapless top.
FG3
Figures 3 & 4: Avatar of FG5 in World of Warcraft® (left) and FG5 in real life (right)
The second example shows a different way of personalizing the avatar to convey meaning.
FG3’s avatar is a female tauren. It has longer arms and legs, whereas the bust seems short and
the character looks vaulted. Unlike the rest of the body, the arms, legs and extremities are
greater in size.
Thus, we can deduce that this character has unique characteristics of visual attributes that are
different than human proportions. Indeed, the members of the body, which correspond to the
hands and feet are animalized: the legs seem to end with ‘hooves’ and the feet are thick. As to
the face, what is striking is the character’s phosphorescent eyes that are almost completely
hidden by an armor and an impressive helmet. Blue lights are present on the blue armor that
has ‘peaks’ on top of the shoulders. In the game WoW, the chaman characters stand for the
61 mysticism. Indeed, the role of this class is to be a “spiritual guide”. In this way, smoke which
escapes of the character’s armor, which also contains blue lights, participate to creating the
religious and magic aspect of chaman taurens.
When the gamer talks about the creation of her avatar, we notice that she also chose a female
avatar because she is a girl. The choice of the gender is thus considered obvious for her.
However her wish to be a tauren in the game seems to be a personal and a non-strategic one:
FG3 ‘The first thing that am sure, was that I do not want to be part of the Alliance;
all my characters are from the Horde. The Alliance is not really appealing to me, it is
the “good side”, the Humans, the Dwarfs... I am more attracted by the “dark side”
and I create (…) Taurens.’
She did not want to convey a feminine image or an image that looks like herself in real world.
However she wanted something that would entertain her.
FG3 ‘I have few avatars (…) and I choose the tauren because without her (sic) armor,
she looks like the characters in the Orangina advertisement’3
Moreover, it is hard to notice any objectively attractive signs about female gender in this
character. It represents the ugliness and the opposite of femininity. In contrast, the female
tauren conveys an opposite representation to what one might see in other videogames. In this
respect, this avatar challenges the feminine stereotype, which turns it into something
intriguing and interesting.
The avatar is bodily dehumanized. Furthermore, the avatar does not appear as a feminine
figure. Indeed, the avatar’s disproportionate body does not match the anatomic model of
women, with the main assets that constitute it.
We can notice through these two analysis that the visual representation of the feminine
gender do not always result from an identification process with the gamer’s body. Indeed,
3
The link of the Orangina (brand of beverage) advertisement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NweyFpEiaNg
62 FG2’s avatar represents an idealistic version of the feminine body, whereas FG3’s character
is far from it. The tauren chosen by FG2 is consciously built on opposite visual norms to the
female anatomic model, and even to the human anatomic model. In this is way it is
dehumanized. Thus, the representation of the female gender does not depend on universally
shared assets. These two gamers’ identifications are partly coming from the fact that they
chose to be represented by a female gender (gamers are allowed to choose their gender from
the very beginning of the game). As we just demonstrated it, this gender is mentally preestablished because it is not only defined by physical characteristics. An avatar is gendered
from the beginning of the game. The gamer does not necessarily need a gendered building of
their avatar’s body modeled on theirs.
63 General conclusion
In the course of this research project, we came to notice that the gender of an avatar is not
one of the most important pillars in the creation process of a virtual identity in WoW. Our
findings have shown that the players’ personal tastes, their interest in the narrative
consistency of the medieval-fantasy universe, and their wishes to elaborate the best gameplay strategy have remarkable influence in the building of an avatar. Furthermore, these
motivations are not specifically gender-related, as both female and male gamers mention.
Yet, the forms of identification through one’s avatar differ from one gamer’s gender to
another. Female players may just be more sensitive to the design and general aesthetical
appearance of their avatars than men. Following this line of thought, these differences can be
explained by the different considerations of female and male gamers about the game world.
Indeed, most men see the gaming space as an area of development, whereas most women
consider WoW a platform to socially interact with others. This being said, it is easier for men
to fit in the gaming space since it has always being considered as a masculine space, whereas
this is for this precise reason that women cannot see it as an appropriate area of development
to them and need to find other means to open up in this area. Yet, it is also not reasonable to
claim that women are in a deviance position in the game, since they have been invading more
and more this so-called masculine space in the last decade.
From that postulate, it can be argued that gender differences in the gaming space become
apparent in the mediated interactions of people, through the social norms that are integrated
and reproduced there.
The avatar creation process itself, which is the very beginning of game-play, does not present
a particularly sexist context, to the extent that characters posses the exact same skills, and
switching genders cannot affect this phenomenon. The idea of sexism, if there is one as clear
and as such, then comes up later. This is rather in the representation of the avatar by its owner
and other gamers, and in the ways the players interact and modify their interactions mainly
based on the avatars’ gender, that an idea of sexism may be found. In such cases, gender
might be considered as a core influence in people’s social interactions in game worlds.
Thus, our research has helped us understand how the avatars represent certain meaning
potentials to their owners, and how these representations determine the way they play the
game. Sexism, in its mainstream definition, was then not as present in the game as we
64 expected it, or at least under a different form. Sexism appeared to be a, more or less, subtle
manipulation tool rather than a general spirit from which women would suffer.
We believe the socio-cultural analyses of avatars as tools for gender construction in online
worlds is a rich and promising field for the application of new theories and methodologies.
65 Literature Review
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BOURDIEU P., The Male Domination, 1998
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BUTLER J., Gender Trouble, Routledge Kegan&Paul, 1990
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FOUCAULT M., History of Sexuality, 1976
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HARAWAY D., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, A Cyborg
Manifesto, Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century, 1991
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PEIRCE, Ch.S., Ecrits sur le signe (assembled and translated with commentary by G.
Deledalle), Paris: Seuil, 1978
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