MMORPG anime Sword Art Online’s brutal honesty in depicting the gender and looks of the players behind their virtual avatars has turned more than a few heads, as has the realisation that it is really an anime about creepy otaku pretending to be cute girls online…
The actual anime is being reasonably well received in spite of the fact that almost all the cute girls are actually men (it remains to be seen whether it takes things a step further and has a few episodes devoted to camping rare mobs for hours only to have them stolen by Chinese gold farmers or worse still killing rats for days only to lose everything in a server rollback):
nothing in SAO tells us “how it is”. Thats the joke. Nobody is sitting in an mmorpg pretending to be “married”. Even adopting a child. Nobody in a mmorpg is as strong as kirito. For a good reason. This is how people who had never played one would imagine a mmorpg. Never played it but hate games and the youth. Comming to the conclusion you must be trash playing it, must be trash watching the show. Return to be a working slave!
Well then you just have to flirt with male characters in MMORPG’s.
Pretending to be a girl is a wonderful thing. And are people really who they look like, or who they really are inside, who they see themselves as, and what their mind is? Transsexuals feel that they are really girls or guys inside, if that’s what they see themselves as, that’s what I see them as, too. I feel shallow, because I care about what people look like a little. But I don’t care so much about what people look like, that I would care about what they look like more than their avatar or who they see themselves as. I’m glad that technology allows for people to be a cute girl if that’s what they want to be. If someone wants to be a cute girl, I want to reach a technology where they can feel that way. And I will see them as a cute girl, too.
What about the Singularity? People will not only will people be able to sink their mind into a virtual world and be a different gender or sex. There will be days with cybernetic body replacements. People will be able to ditch their “creepy otaku body” for a “cute girl”. And then what will you say, Sankaku? “Creepy otaku mascarade as cute girls in cybernetic bodies when in reality they were creepy otaku. Now have fully functioning vaginas.”
Even if they fully replace their bodies with a cybernetic “cute girl”, complete with a functioning vagina, and everything, will you still see them as “creepy men”?
I think I’m the only one looking at this with intrigue towards the sleek user menus demonstrated in the game world. I’d love it if I found an MMO with such style, simplicity, and ease-of-use as is found in this.
As a general rule I always use female avatars when gaming. But I don’t hide the fact that I’m a guy. The basic logic behind this is as follows; I’m not gonna look at a dude’s pixel and polygon ass for 70+ hours of gameplay. Nuff said.