Posted June 5, 2014 at 1:13 am

- When last we left Tedd...

This is probably a huge shock to absolutely everyone everywhere, but when I play video games and can choose between creating a male or female character, I tend to choose female. Precisely why I do that is something I can't really answer, but I can say that this tendency still applies to playing online games with other people.

These games in which I've played as female characters have included Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs). I haven't played a lot of them, but when I have, it's meant a fair amount of interaction with people I've never met in person. Many of those people seemed to conclude that I was genuinely female, and for better or worse, they treated me as such.

To the point, I've been hit on and harassed while playing those games. I can't know for sure who really did genuinely think I was female and who was deliberately trolling me because they believed me to be male, but I do know that there were times when it made me feel very uncomfortable, and there was one occasion when I actually felt the need to report a player for refusing to leave me alone after repeated requests that they do so.

That was just in a darn video game. I can only imagine what it would have felt like in a non-virtual scenario.