In every trio of gaming brothers, there's one who enjoys 'cross-dressing'.

Buzz

This is a recent finding by Quantic Foundry following a survey of approximately 3000 gamers with an average age of 24. Nowadays, the ability to choose the gender for virtual characters in games has become a very familiar detail in many new games, such as Assassin's Creed, Cyberpunk 2077, or Mass Effect. And the aforementioned survey found that, one-third of the male respondents stated they enjoy impersonating female characters in the virtual world of electronic games. Also in this survey, for every 10 female gamers, only 1 prefers selecting male characters to enjoy electronic games.

If the scale of this survey could be applied to the general gaming market on PC and console, then a hypothesis could be made that 60% of the total female characters encountered by gaming brothers daily are controlled by another brother, rather than female players. This figure also reflects a trend that Quantic Foundry discovered back in the early 2000s in popular Western online games like Everquest or World of Warcraft.

There are numerous reasons why a third of male gamers choose female avatars, with one possibly intimately linked to their psychological state. Researchers have proposed several viewpoints to explain this peculiar yet widespread trend. The first viewpoint relates to societal expectations of men, while the second is a hypothesis suggesting that due to these expectations, men tend to explore their gender identity through the virtual world, where they can maintain identity secrecy instead of in real life.

Other negative hypotheses suggest that choosing female avatars is a means for male gamers to control virtual female characters, a way for them to garner more rewards and receive better treatment in the virtual world from other male characters, or a method to conceal their true gaming skills. Whatever the reason, a clear trend is that all genders have the need and preference to play weaker roles in games, not just females.

According to Kotaku

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