When I make chars I usually have a vision of what a member of a class that I am making should look like. If I was making a warlock I would first try to match the looks with the meaning of warlock. Warlocks control demons, their powers are sort of dark almost evil and most of the set items for warlocks have strong primal colors, I imagine I would probably make my warlock pale with some strong hair color like bright red or really blond.

The funnyes process in choosing a character I had with my hunter. She’s a BE female. I first looked up all the pets on petopia and decided which I would like to have the most and than matched the appearance to them. My hunter is blond and I have a cheetah like pet and a brown wolf.

I think I have a fairly equal amount of males and females, though the characters I play the most are female. I am female in real life, so I guess it makes sense. At the same time, with my two most played characters, it was mostly due to looks. I agree that something simply looks odd about male night elves. My death knight is a female draenei, because I think draenei females look awesome, althout me being a girl did play a part.

Have you ever seen the Daedelus Project? It has all kinds of statistics about people who play MMORPGs.

For example: Troll and undead are played by younger players on average, and dwarves and orcs by older (source).

Also, there are five guys who play WoW to every one girl who plays. About every 1 in 100 male characters you see will be piloted by a female in real life. Conversely, about 1 in every 2 female characters is piloted by a guy (source).

I think it’s because when it comes down to it, I really do see my characters as being avatars of myself. I’m not just controlling my female night elf hunter. When I play WoW, I am my female night elf hunter. Or my female tauren hunter. Or my female human mage. Et al. (Actually oddly enough, now that I think about it, I feel more distanced from my non-hunter characters; my hunters are mostly the ones that are “me”.)

So when it came down to the gender selection I picked female because, despite my many guy-ish tendencies, in the end I’m a chick and thus my virtual avatars were going to be chicks. I really had no second thoughts about it. (The characters mostly invariably wound up being tomboys of course.)

These days I’ve become more open to the idea of messing around with male characters, as well as characters with a variety of different personalities– the whole role-playing thing grows on me more and more every day.

But I agree it’s a very interesting topic and I would be interested to hear more about why certain people chose certain characters. I know guys who wouldn’t be caught dead playing female characters, and I also know guys who only play female characters. It’s all very interesting.