This evening was another reminder that there is an entirely 100% reliable asshole detector for massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.

Here's my most recent version, in the front, on your right, with the purple hair. Her supervillain combat name is Misery Chick, and she's the (self-proclaimed) student body president of Aeon University. (You may, for these purposes, ignore her necromantic army, waiting in the lobby of an "abandoned" warehouse in the Black Mariah neighborhood of St. Martial island, where they're waiting for her to give the orders to slaughter an obnoxious gang of cyberpunk tech thieves because they stand between her and an Associated Press reporter who printed Misery Chick's premature death notice.)

What makes her, like a lot of my characters in various MMOs over the years, an entirely reliable asshole detector is that she is costumed as a believable female character. In this case I was going for something of an exaggerated goth-punk college student look: faded black jeans, black Doc Martens, black biker jacket, Cthulhu t-shirt, a big butch-looking black leather belt, elbow-length white gloves, purple stringy hair with black roots still showing, way too much black eye makeup, and a faintly sour facial expression. What makes a character even this obviously a role-playing character, even this obviously exaggerated, an asshole detector is that your average player can see that she's costumed as neither a drag queen nor a slut nor a comic book super-heroine. That combined with the fact that I play her as in-character as I can (although Eris help me if a real goth-punk starts quizzing me on favorite bands, because I doubt I could name more than half a dozen darkwave artists and half of them aren't current), and I've gotten pretty convincing at playing a woman online fooling even most women when I try, left no meaningful doubt in their minds when they (wrongly) concluded that this particular character was being run by an actual woman their own age.

And that's why, like every other convincing female character I've played in any of these games, it is only when I am on this character that (a) nobody listens to my suggestions, (b) I'm called by blatantly condescending and/or insulting nicknames even before I make suggestions, and (c) when I complain about either of these things, citing facts to back myself up, I'm called a bitch. (Boggles my mind that it's the 21st century and guys still use that insult; do they actually think that there's any woman in the world who isn't used to it by now?) And there shouldn't have any business doubting that I had the facts on my side: the character was wearing a 21-month veteran badge, and I was citing numbers straight out of HeroStats. But nope, for defending my claim that I knew what I was talking about with facts, I was "up past my bedtime" and "a total bitch."

Out of 19 players across three teams last night, I ran into six of these. (Thanks to the invasion event, it's actually much easier to find big teams these days.) All of them easily identifiable as men under the age of 25, that is to say, as entirely sub-human. I strongly suspect that it's not a coincidence that all six of them were terrible players, too. It almost certainly wasn't improving their mood that a woman their own age was playing better than they were. But I might not have noticed anywhere near as quickly just how stupid they were if I'd been playing a character that they might have had some doubt about, if they were even vaguely considering the possibility might be played by another guy. It's proof that this is just pathological attitude, though, and not actual fear, that they treat my male characters or female character that look like a guy designed them more respectfully; after all, it's not as if I can crawl through the screen and punch them in the nose. On the contrary, the closest that any of my characters could come to hurting them any time in the last several days was the evening that I was playing this character ... that third team, the one that had 3 of the 6 assholes I met last night, invited me because they needed my character, something they complained bitterly about when I quit after the third mission with them. No, even when they needed her help, at an age that they are famously too interested in the opposite sex, they couldn't stop treating a female player like dirt.