Orcs, Trolls, Elves and more. With such fantastical races and landscapes, online gaming is an area where people can seemingly escape reality and all the expectations of society. For newcomers to the world of online gaming, it seems like anything can happen. You can be whomever you want to be, your race, gender, sexuality or physical limitations no longer matter. Games without avatars provide an even deeper layer of anonymity for players; for all you know, you could be playing against a faceless being behind a computer.

However as most people will quickly realize, the online gaming world is very similar to the “real life” world and strong assumptions and stereotypes regarding players still exist. Players can largely avoid racial stereotypes as it’s hard to tell the race of the person behind the screen, however, gender stereotypes are harder to escape.

After a short period of time, those who enjoy online gaming will eventually notice assumptions regarding your sex based on what role you play online. These assumptions are usually based on gender stereotypes and they will override almost everything else someone does to express his or her gender.

Take MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. In these games there are 3 types of roles that your character can play: Tank, Damage & Healer. The tank’s role is well, to be a tank. He or she will take the most damage and his or her role is to protect other party members by drawing the mobs away from them. Damage just has to do damage, as the name implies and the Healer will have to heal all party members during the fight. Within merely a month of playing, you will be able to pick up the common assumption that the Tank will be male, and the Healer, female, regardless of the sex of their avatar.

It makes sense; the role of the protector is stereotypically male. Meanwhile, the role of a Healer, a supporter who supports the entire party without doing damage, the one person the party must all protect, sounds like the stereotypically female role.

The strange thing is, most people have accepted that not all female avatars are played by women and will greet those declaring themselves to be female in obvious ways with suspicion, due to the stereotype that there are tons of “guild princesses” who try to use the fact that they’re female (or pretend they’re female) to receive perks from men. This belief can easily be found among many gamers, resulting in Rule 30 of the loosely created set of “Rules of the Internet” by /b/:

As well as creation of images such as these:

However, despite the skepticism regarding the presence of women on the internet, the stereotype of the female Healer persists. Sometimes, even when the Healer or Tank makes his or her gender known, people still slip and refer to them as female and male respectively.

Even in a browser-based game that is devoid of avatars to express ones gender, as long as there are roles to play, there will be gender role stereotypes. In Travian, you can be a Hammer or an Anvil. A Hammer is an account with a lot of offensive troops while an Anvil is an account with a lot of defensive. You can guess which role everyone assumes is played by a woman, and which one is played by a man.

Even when a Hammer’s text-only profile is littered with a lot of overly cutesy details (think declaration of love for Disney princesses & Justin Bieber), the assumption is that the account belongs to a guy pretending to be a girl just to rub salt on the wounds of those whose villages he destroyed. Yes, even online, being “beaten by a girl” is a cringe-worthy event.

In games where there are no roles like StarCraft, most people assume you’re male by default, but they have no problem accepting you’re female once they’ve learnt you’re one. However, once there are roles to fulfill, somehow it becomes hard to accept that the aggressive, tough role is played by a woman and the supportive, less aggressive role is played by a man.

Francesca Tanmizi is an ex-Sociology major at Loyola Marymount University who only realized she missed writing Sociology essays after graduation.