IStock Photo 2918785 © Heinz Hemken

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life allow a gamer, from the convenience of his or her bedroom, to build a virtual personality—an avatar—from the ground up. It’s a chance to explore being someone else, or even slip the bounds of humanity altogether. “You” can be a burly gnome or a warrior paladin in full armor. You can be a skimpily dressed female elf or a comely heroine like Lara Croft. But no matter who you are online, chances are that in real life you go through the door marked “Men’s Room.”

MMORPG gaming is widespread. In 2007, there were nearly 228 million men and women over 18 in the United States: at some point in their lives, more than 20 million of them (11 million men and 9 million women) either has made or will make an online avatar. But creating a character once isn’t the same as playing all the time, and there are a lot more male gamers than females. The odds that a World of Warcraft avatar is played by a man are 1 in 1.2 (83.3%).

Nick Yee, who has studied the psychology of MMORPG for 10 years, has found that gender-bending is a frequent phenomenon. According to his findings, which came from self-selected surveys conducted among Everquest players in 2001, men were more than twice as likely to gender-bend as women. Nearly 50% of men tried a different gender, as did nearly 25% of women. In fact, in the popular game World of Warcraft, a female avatar is more likely to be played by a male than by a female—the odds are 1 in 1.82 (54.9%) that a female in the game is being played by a male in real life.

Why do people switch genders? Players report the choice is often strategic. Some players believe females are more agile, and they often benefit from being underestimated. An alluring female can also be the recipient of many gifts bestowed upon her by males. As one man said, guys “are nicer to a cute Dark Elf girl.” Yee’s respondents also frequently cited the attractiveness of the onscreen character as a motivation for men to create female avatars. Both genders reported they enjoyed looking at a hot, muscular member of the opposite sex in the center of their screen—with more men than women at the controls, it’s no wonder there are plenty of sexy female characters to keep them interested.

In some games—the ones with elves, generally speaking—intimacy is incidental to the dragon-slaying, gold-gathering action, and the characters don’t actually consummate their cyber-affairs onscreen. But other worlds are more realistic, like Second Life, a social virtual environment, and Utherverse, whose founder describes it “as a mixture of Facebook and Internet ‘adult’ soft porn.” On these sites things get quite explicit, complete with anatomically correct animation.

Whether you are playing a game like World of Warcraft or living in a simulated reality such as Second Life, electronic emotions frequently lead to real-life relationships. The odds of a male gamer ever dating someone he met in a game are 1 in 6.37. In his 2008 book Second Lives, Tim Guest mentions that Sony’s EverQuest and Funcom’s Anarchy Online each claim at least 20 real-life marriages to their games’ credit.

If your level 5 paladin wants to strike up a relationship with that hot dark elf, be warned. She is most likely not a she at all—but if she is, she just might be the elf of your dreams.

Click here for an interview with Nick Yee.