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The joy and release of customizing your Avatar

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Usually, I hate it choosing: which restaurants to eat or which party to play. Slipping on potential dates also causes anxiety. I do not know. My inability comes from an irrational fear of making the wrong choice, or maybe it’s FOMO of other options.

At the beginning of the pandemic, this doubt did not exist: I quickly chose the Horde. Specifically, a male, Blood Elf, a thief. When I was warned about social activities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention selling friends at the bar or meeting strangers I met online, I went back to playing. World of Warcraft to spend time. I stopped playing seven years ago, apparently I was trading one vice for another. It was not out of lack of interest but out of lack of self-control. I couldn’t play for an hour without getting in all night.

Ironically, in an immersive virtual world with seemingly infinite possibilities, an undecided decision can still be a decisive player. Playing online, other people’s opinions or judgments didn’t put pressure on me. My own desire to please others was silenced by killing emotions to free the wizarding demons. Pleasure drove me, instead of turning me into others like me. Many believe that a player’s identity is often limited to “the person who plays video games,” but within that there is plenty of unparalleled experience. Players can navigate through different existences and identities as soon as they need to change the game they are playing. You can immerse yourself in fantasy while feeling the connection between people with the avatar, controlling their actions. Players manage to lose themselves while not losing their sense of self.

When Gamecube came out in 2001, I inadvertently started to reveal hidden personality interests when I was playing with my twin brother quadruplets. Although our appearances were brothers, our inherent differences were never realized as much as the time to choose a character. Super Smash Brothers. Three user-separated color icons for Samus, Donkey Kong, and Link were placed, waiting for a player to start the game. I took a deep breath and released mine into Zelda.

“You chose a girl!” one of my brothers stated aggressively as if I were blind.

“Oh,” I said, changing the color of the dress from pink to black, as if that would make the Zelda woman less so. “I want to test his powers,” I said.

The excuse for my cover appeared when I saw the character turning into a brilliant shield that reflected the sapphire diamond or jumping and creating an explosive storm fog, reminiscent of my favorite X-Men character, Storm. After pressing D + Down and becoming her alter ego, Sheik, in a light suit similar to the male Catwoman, refused to fight like any other character, despite the mockery – until Mewtwo was unlocked, coincidentally genderless but with me gaining telekinetic abilities. Samus was unanimously my favorite of the brothers, but it would be years before they realized that “she” was a cyborg armor woman. Even though gender has no purpose in the game (even if it doesn’t matter), my brothers reflected on society’s obsession to force others to choose between pink or blue.

I didn’t identify as a girl, but Zelda was one of the few characters who satisfied me with her form and abilities. It’s true that you don’t have to have an attachment with a protagonist to enjoy playing with them, but it takes some of the fun away from us. Author Keith Stuart describes this international paradox conflict in a piece published in 2014 The Guardian: “Far Cry 3, for example, is one of the main action-adventure games ever made, with a sandbox modeled in beautiful sand intertwined with the environment and AI systems. But the plot is full of disturbing colonialist subtexts, and the main character is a horrible boy. identify with this headache. The term playful dissonance is widely ridiculed in the industry, but it is a common striking phenomenon – and when players see no connection to the narrative sequences and within them. the reality of the game, identification and association problems become more problematic. “

For me, part of the experience was choosing characters that fulfilled a fantasy, rather than choosing women because it’s so enlightening “because I’m gay”. Otherwise, maybe I would try with unnecessary Princess Peach. In one examination published in Information, communication and society, the researchers studied the online behavior of 375 participants while conducting a bespoke search World of Warcraft; 23% of male and 7% of female participants chose opposite-sex avatars. Research has found that gender exchange occurs with more experienced and older players. The players ’arguments were varied: the men enjoyed the“ aesthetics ”and attention they received, and the women who decided to play as men appreciated the attention they received. The players liked to enjoy another experience. Oddly enough, men who choose female avatars went for feminine and “beautiful” aesthetics and spoke with more emotional phrases and smiling faces. Even those who did not want to hide their identity idealized the idea of ​​society and strengthened gender by choosing exemplary physical traits and taking a more passive and gentle approach to communication. But regardless of how an avatar or player interacted, their unconscious actions included trends in their offline genre in areas such as movement or jump frequency.

He emphasized the importance of their interplay of ways of transforming their interactions into a real and stimulating game. Men had no problem choosing a troll or elf when acting as a male character, but when they switched to a female player, they designed sexualized avatars as if they were choosing a future romantic partner. Journalist Nathan Grayson wrote about why he wrote in a 2014 article chooses female characters: “Physically speaking I’m attracted to women, but it usually doesn’t affect me to take root from my virtual leather wardrobe to decide what to wear to the big bash. I think I’m long and short in real life. I like the idea of ​​seeing the world – far or near home – through the eyes of others. “Video games have allowed me to do that, at a very low (and often not) fully expressive or realistic level.”

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