Even before I started playing this game, I was well aware of how male dominated it was, in fact, that was the reason why I started playing - to prove people wrong.

     I saw my (male) friends playing characters that I soon found out to be trolls, and I asked if I could try thegame out as it looked pretty neat. ”No way Sara, you'll just die and then I'll have to run for ages in order to get back to my character’s body. Besides, this isn't a game for females”. I was furious, but after a while I stopped bothering, this wasn't something that I had never heard before anyway, so I saw little reason to make a big deal out of it. Time passed though and I found an advert about getting beta-keys to the ”Final Beta” of World of Warcraft. As I had nothing better to do, I figured I should try it. I was spending a huge amount of time playing another MMORPG called ROSE which wasn't exactly the best game around so it wasn't really a downgrade.

 

I registered, started playing, picked something cute (nightelf, who would've guessed?) and quickly found out that this was the same game that my friends had been playing! Weeks, even months passed and I found myself spending more and more time in front of the computer, logging on to WoW to play with newly found friends (grew tired of the nightelf and moved over to the horde-side, as an undead priest) and about a year later I had a discussion regarding gear with my IRL-friends and guess what! I had surpassed them in raiding experience, gear and pvp-ranks! Needless to say I was satisfied. Now I know that it makes little difference as that doesn't tell anyone whether I'm a good player or not, but the satisfaction I felt at that specific moment was incredible. ”Females can't play”, hah!

 

Daily I find myself struggling against those thoughts, and daily I get told ”you're a female, why bother?”, ”there are no females playing games, that's absurd”. May they be jokes or not, it's still frustrating to hear it. A couple of years ago someone told me that ”A joke is only a joke once”, back then I didn't think much about it, but didn't agree either. Might've been that I had lost my sense of humour, or the fact that I had heard it about a billion times, but either way I still ain't laughing.

There are so many female players out there that know how to play and are extremely good at it, yet I often see those players ending up guildless because of the popular belief that we ”get our way with things” thanks to our gender. Of course there are females that (ab)use the fact that they are female in order to get special treatment, I've seen several that got both gold and characters boosted by males that found themselves special for a moment or two, which is definitely a shame as this fact somewhat ruins the game for me in my little world. Then again, if males could do the same things on the same premises, then wouldn't they? I'm definitely not trying to justify people behaving like that, as I'm strongly against it but as I happen to know several males that are playing people off as well it feels somewhat unfair that in most cases it's only the females getting pointed at.
Another thing I do find interesting is the fact that people never really mention the guy that got ”tricked”, as if he didn't have a part in it. If the female did something wrong with offering ”herself” or what ever it might have been, then what would you call him, who accepted it? You know what they say, it takes two to tango.

I've been playing World of Warcraft since the Final Beta and registered my ”real” account on February 11th, 2005 (yes, I was one of those that was standing outside one of the GAME-stores in the middle of the night, waiting for them to open the doors just so that I could waste just another night on lagging before going to school), and I still find it interesting. Not the game itself, but how close to the real life it became, every incident ingame is something that I can relate to in the ”real” world. This makes me wonder though, will the situation ever change? Will I always find myself getting angry when people are underestimating me for the one and only reason that I'm a female?
Probably. Is it worth it? Most definitely!