The attraction of night-elves
Joi Ito has a post about gender of World of Warcraft characters, where he asks if anyone has studied this issue academically. The comment thread is very interesting.
One of the gold nuggets from the comment thread is Nick Yee’s Daedalus project, where he explores the psychology of MMORPGs. Among other things, on Nick’s site I find some interesting data on World of Warcraft Character Race Demographics. Nick writes that night-elves and gnomes significantly more likely to be played by a female player. This is a particularly interesting thing to me, as I started playing WoW last week, and I chose a night-elf as my first character. When I have some more experience I will see how do people treat my character, and if it matters that is female.