Your Avatar in Video Games and Gender: Which One Do You Choose?

[Cloudman]

And I don't mean the Last Airbender, or Korra either, haha.

Now that I got that bad joke out of the way, heya! Cloudhead here again. After posting 2 threads in short times, I thought I'd wait a bit before starting another one. I didn't want to start too many, haha...

Anyways, by avatar, I'm talking about games in which you, yourself, play the role of the protagonist in the game, such as a pokemon trainer in Pokemon, a farmer in Harvest Moon, the avatar character in Fire Emblem Awakening, the Prince or Princess in Rune Factory 4, or any other games that has you create or use your own character.

So what do I mean by gender? Well, in the earlier days of games, for example Pokemon Red/Blue, you could play as a trainer starting on your own journey. You got to name yourself, your pokemon, and your rival! (Poopface, Dickhead, whatever obscene thing you thought of at the time!) However, you could only play as a male character, whether you were actually a male, or female playing the game. It was like this for a little while.

Later on, they started introducing a girl option, starting in Pokemon Crystal. That was a cool option, but I never owned that game, so I didn't think much of it. When I got Ruby/Sapphire, I had the option of choosing a boy or girl. Of course, I went with the boy character, since I am a guy after all. I did like the design of the girl character, May. I liked using the guy, but I sort of wished I used May instead. At that time, I thought that was strange and dared not to do that, since if people say my file, they may think I was weird for picking the girl option.

Then came Diamond/ Pearl. I really disliked the male design and really liked the female design, but i couldn't pick the girl option since I thought that would be seen as strange by others. So I reluctantly went with the boy option. Funny enough, most of my friends chose the girl option. So then I thought maybe that wasn't as strange as I thought.

As time went by, I stopped worrying about this, and when I encountered games like this, I would choose whichever character I liked at the time, whether boy or girl. I'll use a boy on some occasions or the girl, usually depending on the design, or if I just think the girl character is really cute! I'm sorry, I'm a bad guy, haha... The only times I'll stick to a guy is in Pokemon SIlver (the guy looks so cool!) or Rune Factory (I wanna date chicks please. No dudes... :P )

So yeah, I don't pay much mind to it.

So after this long winded story, here my questions to you:

What gender do you pick in these kind of games? Do you stick to your own, or do you play as the opposite gender? Do you jump around, based on any criteria, like design or looks? Do you think it's weird that people do that, or do you pay no mind to it?

Lemme know what you think! : )