A Call for Expandable Codpieces In MMORPGs

Staci Krause writes "The Core for Entertainment and Gaming has an editorial on the growing trend in MMORPGs to to make every area of a woman's anatomy customizable. The female writer of the editorial doesn't mind this at all, but would like to see the same applied to a man's anatomy as well, suggesting: 'Is it so wrong of me to want to see a well endowed man online to run around and battle hideous monsters with?'"

Arms race

[jonadab]

The problem here is the mentality of males in general and male gamers in
particular. If one guy has a sixteen-inch thingy, all the other guys will
want their character to have an eighteen-incher, and if you allow that, it
won't be many more iterations of one-upmanship before you see guys running
around with, effectively, three legs, and I'm not sure it would stop there.

The only way this could be practical at all would be if the game company
charged on an exponential scale for the extra size. Then you'd be able to
tell who had the most money to blow on their character, but apart from that
things could be kept mostly in check, with most of the characters having
proportions only abnormal in the normal "more than reality" way of such
games, rather than making Salvador Dali look sane.

Interesting, but some points have to be qualified.

[Inoshiro]

The male body is as beautiful as the female body; the notion that it's not attractive is as silly as the notion that women have a lower sex drive. As guys, we usually don't go around checking other guys out -- but we are subconciously rating ourselves in to our competition. Women do this too, they just do it a lot more conciously that guys. They're willing to tell you about it ;) Plus, because of how the media works, there is a lower ratio of attractive guys to attractive girls in most things.

Women do tend to look at more of the full meal deal when talking about how attractive a guy is, but that's only natural since they get to be pregnant. If guys were the ones who became pregnant after a night of sex, I'm sure we'd all be thinking more of the long-term when looking at women. Most guys start to look at the long-term anynays, once they're past the high school relationship phase.

looks

[ggwood]

Having played Everquest for a while, I am surpriesed that there has not been more freedom to dress your character in more or less suggestive attire as desired. I jokingly refer to this as the /slutty option which you can turn on or off. Actually, I think there is room for a few options: just give people a few (say 3) different looks: encased in steel (most conservative), encased in steel...but with curves in the right places, and revealing...which I will leave to your imagination.

Essentially, the same could be done for male characters, and the details of which I will leave up to your imagination.

None of this has to involve more graphics. Currently it can all be done via "hiding" certain pieces of armor, to reveal the default clothes underneeth. Many of us in Everquest want a /hidehelm option since we are allowed to do pretty nice customization to our faces with the /pickface command - but then *no one can see it* because we ware these giant helms.

I know people who intentionally pick "crown" type helms which do not show up just so that people can see their customization. This is particularly important to women, in my experience. They want to look nice in game - and *all* female character models which don't look like monsters having huge breasts annoys them.

I think game designers would garner way more female and casual player interest with three things:
(1) a large degree of avatar customization (Everquest does okay, but there are problems - see above). Give people the option to dress as flirty or elegent or conservative as they want, and obviously allow them to change from one to another.
(2) cooperative gameplay (Everquest is great at this: you gain so much benefit from cooperation with others in groups and in guilds and there really is no emphasis on player killing except on specific servers)
(3) downtime. I know downtime is unpopular, but if you have no time to pause and rest up a bit you will never get to know anything about anyone you are playing with because you will have no time to chat. All MMORPGs probably have great chat tools, but if you have no time to use them... Of course, too much downtime is really bad - its just going to get boring.

Originally I thought GM events and dynamic content would keep me coming back to Everquest, but ultimately it is the players themselves. They have helped me out in the past so I want to help them out in the future, and together a great group of friends makes the game both much easier and more pleasent.
Face it: gameplay is always going to be better in single player games but after playing a MMORPG, I really can't bring myself to play normal offline games much. So I can build a great city in Simcity or conquer the galaxy in Masters of Orion...so what? If I have a positive interaction with someone in Eq, its far, far more rewarding.

It is the casual players, the players who bring their girlfriends/boyfriends etc. which will continue to grow the market for these games. Hard core gamers will always be there, but (1) there are not too many of them and (2) people who commit to play (with their guild for example) every night for 4-8 hours are just plain scary - as a game designer, you are not getting any more money from these people but you are going to get alot more problems from them.

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