Playing as a Male Character

Last week, after more than twelve years of playing Star Wars: The Old Republic almost daily, I completed a class story on a male character for the first time. The question of why it took me this long is kind of fascinating to me.

I've played video games with male protagonists in the past without giving it a second thought, but something about MMOs makes them different somehow. I've never shied away from creating male characters there either (one of the very first alts I created back when I started playing WoW in 2006 was a human male warlock) but for some reason I always struggled to get as invested in them as I was in my female characters.

I do know that I'm at least not entirely alone in this - Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry did an interesting survey about gender preferences in gaming a few years ago, which found that a large majority of women prefer to play female characters, but only less than half of the surveyed men preferred playing male characters. In fact, almost a third of men also preferred playing female characters.

Anecdotally, my own experience has been that people have basically two modes of engaging with their characters in an MMO: by viewing them as an extension of themselves, an avatar or personal representation, or by viewing them as toys to play with, dolls to dress up, action figures that they can make jump around. This isn't to say that people aren't capable of doing both, but I think that "by default" you tend to lean either one way or the other when you start a game.

My personal observation at least has been that people who prefer playing characters that match their real life gender tend to view them more as representations of themselves, while those who'll happily mix and match view them more as objects to be played around with and with whom they don't necessarily identify. Though why women would be so much more prone to the former than the latter is honestly a mystery to me.

Either way, my strong preference for female characters in MMOs wasn't something to which I gave a huge amount of thought in the past... but of course SWTOR has a lot of "gendered" content in the original class stories, such as flirt options and whole romances that are only accessible to you if your character is the right gender. After more than a decade of exploring the game with dozens of female alts, I was really starting to feel that I was missing out by denying myself access to those optional story bits designed for male characters.

I actually created my very first male character in TOR back in 2012: Zilek, my Jedi consular on what is now the Satele Shan server. I know this because I mentioned his creation in this post from October 2012. As I anticipated back then, I partially played through the starting zone and then didn't do anything with him again for ages.

As far as I can tell from screenshots, I decided to check in on him again for reasons I can no longer remember around May 2019. What I do remember is that I almost instantly realised that I suddenly hated the way he looked (I'd originally given him shoulder-length black hair and that complexion option with the lip liner), so I gave him a makeover to make him more visually appealing. That helped, but somehow the quest cut scenes still bothered me. For some irrational reason I cannot quite fathom, it felt strange to see him talk and have a male voice coming out of "my" character. It just felt wrong. So I bought him an outfit with a mask - something I usually never do - but in this instance it weirdly helped to make him more playable, as if it made it easier to pretend he was secretly a girl or something?! If that sounds kind of insane to you, I didn't think any better of myself for feeling that way.

I levelled him for a few weeks, but then forgot about him again for the next three years. It wasn't until I started doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers that I began to give him attention more regularly and got him to max level, though I still haven't finished his class story.

As I got more into the idea of levelling a male character of each class, I made more of my new alts on the other servers male. They are all still relatively low level and not very advanced, but they exist and get play time, even if sporadically. At some point I realised that the only permutation I was still missing entirely was a male Sith warrior... so I went ahead and created one on my home server Darth Malgus. This was also around the time I was having a blast PvPing as a Juggernaut on Shae Vizla, so my newest warrior's purpose became to both do lowbie PvP while levelling and go through the warrior class story as a male character for the first time.

And... I actually succeeded! The questing really picked up once I outlevelled the lowbie bracket, as I wasn't keen to start midbie PvP at the very bottom of that pile and focused on progressing the story over queueing for arenas for the next ten levels or so.

I actually had a lot of fun with the story as well, and I didn't even have the urge to hide my character's face this time. I think what helped was that with this one, I had an idea for a "character" from the beginning and didn't even pretend that I was using him to represent my real self at any point. But it required a kind of actual "work" from me at first, as I had to think about what his personality was and how he would react to certain situations. There were some choices where I had to pause and think for a really long time to remind myself that I didn't want to go with whatever my gut feeling was, but what this character would do in that situation. For how challenging I found that at times, it was also a new kind of fun to be honest, and he quickly became one of my new favourites, as I connected to him in a different way to all my other alts.

I went in with a plan to romance one of the warrior's female love interests (seeing that kind of stuff was part of the whole point of making a male character, after all) and found myself surprisingly torn by which route to go down. I initially didn't think he was going to be interested in Vette, but she can be so charming... with Jaesa, I wasn't sure whether I was going to make her light or dark side, as he wasn't clearly one or the other himself, but I eventually ended up with her dark side version.

Now, dark side Jaesa has always been one of my least favourite companions, and I've been baffled by why she's so popular with some people. After playing through her romance, I can at least kind of see why - she may be psychotically violent, but she's also a stereotypically bad girl that falls head over heels for the player character and pursues him aggressively - I can see that being appealing. It's just that if you're playing a female character, like I always have, you're only left with the conversations where she's being absolutely psychotic and nothing else.

I thought that since I'd flirted with both Vette and Jaesa, there would be some sort of conversation that would force me to choose between them at some point, but I don't know if I just did things in the wrong order but I never saw anything like it. The most I got was Jaesa making a reference to my character having a thing with the Twi'lek but she never seemed to take all that much issue with it. Vette on the other hand never even mentioned Jaesa and asked to get married after a single kiss, which was just an obvious "whoa, no". Ultimately my warrior ended up agreeing to marry Jaesa in the most assholish way possible, which I thought was both disturbing and funny in equal amounts.

I kind of like the idea of continuing to play him to see some of the expansion content as a male character as well (even if I have no particular urge to flirt with Lord Cytharat, who knows what might happen) but realistically my enthusiasm for that kind of thing tends to fizzle out once I hit the level cap at the latest - we'll see how it goes.