Cross-Gender Avatars in Games

Gender in online games is a well-charted territory. The linked post echoes this more in-depth article from 1999: http://tharsis-gate.org/articles/imaginary/GENDER~1.HTM.

Edit: There's also the following quote on men playing as women from a 1993 paper [1] on MUDs ("multi-user dungeons", see [2]). I find myself amused by how true its final sentence rings twenty years later [3].

>Many people, both male and female, enjoy the attention paid to female characters. Male players will often log on as female characters and behave suggestively, further encouraging sexual advances. Pavel Curtis has noted that the most promiscuous and sexually aggressive women are usually played by men. If you meet a character named "FabulousHotBabe," she is almost certainly a he in real life.

[1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/gender_swapping.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

[3] But don't misread it as reenforcing the tired cliche that "there are no girls on the internet". It's rather about how the "FabulousHotBabes" of the Internet are very often not its girls.