Chinese MMORPG requiring females to verify gender to play fe

There are MMORPGs out there that mandate your in-game gender matches your physical gender. The idea of this completely floored me, mainly because I practice nearly constant gender-bending in almost every game I play. My [url=http://endless-gears.livejournal.com/:7049xhco]Endless Gears[/url:7049xhco] is male just as most of my stories are female. Limiting someone to one gender, or not allowing them to experience TG, or playing something else is kind of terrifying.

As is verifying your sex via web cam. I don’t have a web cam and won’t ever get one. I’ve gotten hurt when people know me too easily in real life. But, it makes you wonder how they are going to prove it.

Now, one of the interesting things is a comment on the Boing Boing site about it.

[quote:7049xhco]You know, having played some of the other MMOs where they restrict character gender to player gender (like Ragnarok Online and Maple Story), (1) people fake it anyway, and (2) the end result is that female characters get harassed that much more because people are reasonably sure there’s a girl at the other end.[/quote:7049xhco]

That is actually a very good point, in my opinion. Knowing someone is female makes it easier for the abuse and singling out that happens during those. Trust me, when I choose to play a female on MUD’s, I got hit up so often for netsex it wasn’t even funny. I also don’t care. I mean, I really don’t care if the “sexy hot woman with flaming red hair” on the other end is male, female, a computer, or a horse. They, like everyone else I communicate with on the Internet, is just an alias and a personality. And that is the way it should be. I full admit, I wear a mask on the Internet. I have personas and I have roles. None of them are truly me anymore than the person who walks into work is really me. We all wear masks in life. Sometimes, I’d like the masks to be male, sometimes I want them female, sometimes I want them to be a cabbit.

Obviously, I encourage people to put themselves in other shoes, so I’m HIGHLY biased on this one.

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I think it is that hope it becomes something more than just electrons passing between two people. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been propositioned to go visit someone or do it in “real life.” I used to do that when I was younger… let’s say it worked out very poorly.

I do think relationships online are viable, but I probably will never let them pass into physical relationships without a lot of bribery, begging, and trust. I’m bad enough that I give hints to my real identity online (and I shouldn’t).

Frankly, in the situations when I found out a gal was playing by a guy, I did one of two things. If I was feeling annoying (in one case, he was “coming clean” in hopes that I’d accept him as a male), I told him I was also a male. For some reason, that conversation never continued. In the other, I just go “cool” and keep doing whatever I was doing with them.