Girls just wanna have fun
by Jennie Lees 
Dec 15th 2005 at 11:00AM
Continuing the academic vein today, the PlayOn project at PARC has been investigating the distribution of gender, race and class in WoW. Finding out a character's gender for the purposes of research is difficult, as a thorough census involves the survey-taker bots being close enough to target each character at least once, but the PlayOn guys managed it and found some interesting stuff.
Firstly, Horde women are rarer than Alliance women: one out of three Alliance characters is female, compared to one out of five Horde. The three races with the most female characters are night elves, humans and gnomes--the race with the least females is dwarves, with the Horde races coming between the two extremes. By class, over 40% of all priests are female, but you'll only find 15% of shamans are girls. That corresponds to the Alliance/Horde imbalance, but paladins are also pretty short on women too.
Nick Yee's Daedalus Project suggests that, in terms of real-life gender, the balance is more or less the same on both the Alliance and Horde sides, so the difference is made up by gender-bending. Since female Night Elves are more fun to look at than female Orcs, this does make sense, though gender-bending data suggests that even though there aren't as many female avatars as male, a lot of them will be played by men. But you already knew that that naked lady Night Elf dancing for money was actually a guy named Joe, didn't you? As for me, I've female Dwarves and Tauren Shamans sitting in harmony with my Night Elf Druid, so beauty isn't everything.
[Thanks for the correction, Eric]
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Baron Samedi Dec 15th 2005 1:26PM
Wait - just to be clear on this: the *characters* are male & female, not the actual *players*, right? So this doesn't claim that one out of every five Alliance players are female, just that the avatars are female.
jennie Dec 15th 2005 1:36PM
That's correct. The Daedalus Project has data on the people behind the avatars: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001369.php
syco Dec 15th 2005 2:24PM
I'm one of those weird guys that plays a female charector. I have a female priest, for one because I couldn't possibly imagine having a male priest. She's loosely based on White Mage from 8bit Theater... She gets a lot of attention... It was a bit disturbing at first, but I've gotten used to it. She's just hot, I guess.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/sycomonkey/persatia.png
Cort Dec 15th 2005 3:49PM
I have male and female characters, though I'm a male. I chose the Gnome female for my rogue because I thought it ironic that a cute, redheaded pigtailed gnome with such a delightfully cute voice could dish out so much damage. My druid is also female, but simply because the NE males look weird to me... All torso and arms with toothpick legs. Badly proportioned, IMHO. My main is still Cort, my human mage, though. :P
Aenara Dec 15th 2005 6:43PM
I am female and I play a female. I was going to play a male blood elf when the expansion comes out until I realized one really important thing - People give me free gold, just for being a female character! I don't really want to give that up. And to shush all you people who are like - oooh that is sooo taking advantage, no its not. When I am somewhere and someone is a bit short to buy something they really really want (like this dwarf guy who wanted skinning lessons) I paid for the whole thing for him, and frequently I give away really good stuff I make in leatherworking to other players- usually male.
jennie Dec 15th 2005 7:02PM
That's correct. The Daedalus Project has data on the people behind the avatars: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001369.php
Eric Nickell Dec 16th 2005 2:59PM
Jennie, Thank you for referencing our work. As a minor correction, we have bots located near the auction houses that collect census data automatically once they are logged in. (Effectively, they use the /who command repeatedly.) While they're collecting the census, they simultaneously try to target players near them. If they can target a player, they can determine the gender, and they record. The difficulty is that at any time, there is some set of characters who have never passed near enough to one of our bots that we know their gender.