Alone in an imperfect world

My previous posting has generated some interesting discussion amongst my friends and I. Most of us have had some experience with online gaming, if we're not still online gamers to this day.

To be clear on this issue: no, I do not consider myself to still be an online gamer. Yes, I'm playing Tabula Rasa but it doesn't consume enough of my waking hours for it to be an obsession and I doubt it ever will. My last true online gaming experience was with Neverwinter Nights and that went bye-bye when the server my friends and I were playing on went kablooey. I'd love to get back into NWN but after a particularly nasty bit of WGA business, I now find that I'm missing the CD-Keys for HotU and SotU. Whee.

Anyhoo, the discussions I've had recently have led me to an interesting discovery, or at least a unique postulate: the isolation from online gaming is more detrimental to women than it is to men. There is no conclusion to this posting - it's merely a starting point for further discussion if you so desire.

Here's how I came to that conclusion, so bear with me as it'll take a while. We all live in an imperfect world with imperfect selves. When we go online to play, not only do we get a choice to act out our imagination on a more fantastic world that real life, we also get a chance to customize our online avatar that represents us in that game.

Look, we all have things we'd like to be better about ourselves. Some of us want to lose weight, be taller, be prettier, have more scars (don't ask - I didn't understand that part either), etc. This impacts men less than women because we tend to obsess and care more about personal appearances than men. This isn't anything bad - it's a cultural thing and it can be quite fun. Most of us learn to live with our imperfections. For example, I'd love to be able to wear white and blue well, and also be a tad taller not to mention slimmer. But I understand that these are not things I can fix easily if at all. So I learnt to live with it, as do other women with their little imperfections.

When I go online, I get to custom craft my character to be anyone she wants to be. Heck, if I wanted to, I can even cross gender lines and be a guy. The point is that not only does online interaction isolate us, it also seduces us on a different level by letting us wipe away all our imperfections at the Character Creation Screen. After a while, the online world with our perfect selves becomes more of a real home than real life itself.

I think everyone who has ever gotten into online games will know exactly what I'm talking about. It's difficult to disentangle ourselves from our perfect world - it becomes harder and harder to express ourselves in real life when we can be quite personable in our virtual worlds.

This is a problem. A big one.

When a woman loses her ability to cope with her imperfections, she tends to let herself go. I'm not saying it's right, but society isn't very tolerant of women like that. For better or for worse, our appearance matters more than it does to men.

We are seeing an increase in women gamers lately. In Japan, there are more female users of the Nintendo Wii consoles than there are male users and as such, Nintendo is shifting its marketing strategy away from traditional shooter/quest/platform games over to lifestyle apps like Wii Life, which lets you manage your diet and exercise.

I'm not sure what to think of this. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. Maybe it'll force a big enough change in our cultures that the importance of appearances will be downplayed. I doubt that part though.