How I broke a teenage boy's heart...

So, it's been a while - funny how spending your spare time remodelling the nursery, preparing for a new baby, and...*cough*levelling your warlock to 45 in WoW*cough*...can eat up your spare time.

As I've related previously, I mostly play an undead female Warlock named Cryptana - she's my "main", as the kids would say. I role play my character as a female, but I make no secret of the fact that I, the player, am a man. And yet...

A few weeks ago I was in a group in Scarlet Monastery - I'd just left my previous guild, so one of the guys in the group noticed that and invited me to his guild. I thought "what the heck", and joined him, and so began an interesting friendship. This kid was astoundingly nice - he'd always greet me when I logged in ("Cryptana! Hi sweetie!"), we often hooked up to do quests together, and he was always paying me the oddest compliments ("Wow, you're really cool for someone middle-aged", etc), which maybe should've tipped me off. But I just figured he was a nice kid who liked to play in character and enjoyed interacting with adults...

So we're out in Tanaris killing pirates the other day, and he mentions that he's going to have to log soon, as his mom gets mad when he plays too long. I laughed and said that I'd had a few conversations like that with my wife. And after a long pause, he writes back "Wait, you're a man?!?! But...why do you play a female character?".

And suddenly, everything is very, very weird.

Everything clicks into place, and we both realize that he's been trying to flirt with a 38 year old man for the past two weeks. And it's not really clear where the conversation goes after something like that...

As an experiment, a few years ago I played an online game where I pretended to be female (not just playing with a female name [Princess Dye], but I actually stated that I was a female player) and it's amazing how differently I was treated. The skills that made me a mediocre (at best) male player, got me no end of compliments as a female player. As a male player, I was just one of a faceless crowd, but as a female player, I was greeted enthusiastically whenever I joined the game, and had an entourage of faithful, gallant companions that would follow me about and fight by my side. I'm reluctant to draw any dramatic conclusions from that experience, but it was enough to convince me that a woman's experience in our world is very very different from a man's (duh).

So I guess we both learned something from our little encounter. I learned that people believe what their eyes tell them, so when someone sees my little female avatar, their brains tell them "woman" and they react accordingly, even if intellectually they know I'm not. And my young friend learned that if someone acts like a man, sounds like a man, and says he's a man, he probably is a man, even if his character looks like a girl. Very few women call themselves an "old man" as a figure of speech, it turns out.