Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project has a new issue up – or very nearly so. It’s showing up in bloglines, but I can’t seem to see the actual research on the site soon. I’m sure all of this will be remedied shortly..

The most interesting is the survey on gender bending, which says that that while the dude may look like a lady, that lady don’t look like a dude.

23% of male players (N = 939) listed a character of the opposite gender as their most enjoyable character compared with 3% of female players (N = 184). In WoW, men are about 7-8 times as likely to gender-bend than women.In other words:

about 1 out of every 2 female characters is played by a man
about 1 out of every 100 male characters is played by a woman

While not the first time I’ve heard this asserted, I think it is the first time I’ve seen any sort of numbers ascribed to it. And it reveals nakedly an interesting but apparently utterly false myth – that girls who play MMOs are so tired of being hit on that they choose to play as guys. I suspect that, if they’re really that sick of the idiots in any given social space, most will choose to just plain quit.