The name comes from "crossplay," a subset of cosplay where one dresses as a character of a different gender. It's also worth noting that crossplayers aren't exclusively men playing women; occasionally women play as male characters, one reason being to be treated as One of the Boys, the other being that all the best characters are guys. Both this trope and the aforementioned cosplays are also commonly used as an outlet by closeted transgender folk.
Crossplayers are usually quite up-front about their real life gender—and simply prefer avatars of a different gender for aesthetic reasons, like seeing the Impossibly Cool female version of armor models or certain content is gender-locked. A common defense of crossplay is "If I have to look at an ass all day, I'd prefer a nice one" when a Third-Person camera is involved. Less frequently, it's for the sake of role-play.
Whatever the reason, in real life, crossplayers are pretty common in modern MMORPGs, and very few people see it as a big deal. The term is sometimes used to describe someone who plays a character of a different gender in a Tabletop RPG.
Contrast with the G.I.R.L., when a cross player is actively pretending their real life self outside the digital space is of the other gender. See also There Are No Girls on the Internet, for the (mostly) discredited phenomenon of users assuming everyone online was male.
Obviously not the same as a real-life Cross Dresser, and also is different from Cross-Dressing Voices or people who play multiplayer games with people on other consoles.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- .hack
- .hack//SIGN: Tsukasa has a male avatar in the game, but is female in real life. This isn't revealed until late in the series, and they don't believe it at first because they don't remember anything before getting stuck in the game. The individual had serious gender identity issues thanks to a father who forced her to act like a boy.
- The "Let's Meet Offline" extra attached to the .hack//Legend of the Twilight anime has Hotaru as a Cross Player. This is definitely not the case in the manga and the rest of the franchise, and is one of the reasons that the anime is the first major of the Series Franchise not considered canon.
- Gord and Saburou of .hack//Roots are also cross players though the latter ventures into G.I.R.L. territory due to their insistence they are female. The former is female but plays a male character, though it's not touched upon in the series proper.
- In the Chobits anime:
- Hideki encounters Yoshiyuki Kojima (AKA "Dragonfly") in a MMORPG long before meeting him in person. Although Kojima's avatar is modeled on his persocom Kotoko and he affects some feminine mannerisms, the fact that he does not disguise his voice makes his gender a dead giveaway.
- Shinbo crossplays and his Avatar looks like his cram school teacher.
- In Gintama, Gintoki and Kagura each play a character of the other gender in an RPG called Monkey Hunter. Justified in Gintoki's case because he understands that people will be more eager to help a cute girl, and proves his point by trolling Shinpachi when he first meets up with him; his voice sounding perfectly feminine up until the truth comes out, at which point it reverts to being as masculine as usual.
- Jewelpet Kira☆Deco!: Coal's Yami Quest persona is a female capybara in a black dress named "Black Angel". The same applies for the Dark General's persona, Yamirin.
- In Lucky Star, Konata comments on how she enjoys playing a male character in an MMORPG (Ragnarok Online or something very like it). The character is "married" to a female character whose player is a guy.
- In the anime adaptation of Phantasy Star Online 2, Rina Izumi plays a male CAST named SORO. Itsuki also inadvertently discovers that one party member he was playing with, who appears as a cat girl, is actually a male construction worker.
- Almost the point of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, as both of the main two characters and half the supporting cast are playing different genders in the game.
Asian Animation
- One episode of Happy Friends shows the male Big M. playing a video game with a female player character. Happy S. mistakes him for a girl and has what's basically an affair with "her".
Comic Books
- DIE (2018) has a character named Dominic Ash. His character is a girl named Ash in the fantasy world Die.
- In Gold Digger (Antarctic Press), Gina likes making avatars that are Hunky male versions of herself. This often goes beyond video games.
- Knights of the Dinner Table: A tabletop rpg example. Gordo Sheckberry routinely plays female pixie fairies in his campaign which occasionally creeps the other players out. The eponymous Knights themselves were forced to play opposite gender characters as part of an experiment when Sara took over the game. They immediately abused their feminine wiles to rough up johns instead of engaging in the plot then turned themselves male as soon they got ahold of an artifact, all except Bob who got a little too attached to his character.
Dave: That was brutal!... Is there really a "Spontaneous Human Combustion" table?
Sara (the GM): It had to be done. 'Bobarella' had to die. - Runaways opens with Alex Wilder playing an MMORPG as several other people, playing as more famous Marvel characters (Captain America, Daredevil, the Hulk, Emma Frost, and Invisible Woman). We don't learn this for a long time, but Emma Frost and Invisible Woman are both played by a guy and Daredevil is a woman. Oddly enough, when Alex reveals he's a teenager, none of the other people believe him.
Fan Works
- Super Mario Bros.: Monday Night Mix: Like in their original world (where they are Boyfriend and Girlfriend, respectively), Bonnie and Giles take the forms of Mario and Princess Peach when they're transported to MX's world.
- Khaos Omega prefers to play as female characters largely because a female is the more likely gender to have access to shoes more appealing to the fanfiction author. Especially if said shoes are high heels. Khaos even based three of his fanfic characters (specifically Holli Toriyama, Ikora Brazie, and Hollie Madrazo) on his game characters. One game where this trope doesn't apply is Pokémon Legends: Z-A, but that's because Paxton has just as much access as Harmony to wardrobe items that in previous games were exclusive to females.
Film — Live-Action
- In The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, Gary plays the sorceress Luster. He's the antithesis of The Roleplayer, though, so during the Deep-Immersion Gaming segments Luster is alternately played by a woman and a crossdressing man depending on whether Gary has recently been reminded of his character's gender.
- Good Boys opens with Max using a fantasy RPG's Character Customization menu as a form of Poor Man's Porn before his dad interrupts, implying that he does this so that he'll have an attractive female avatar to ogle as he plays. Apparently, he's into thicc orc women.
- This was once going to be the case for Switch in The Matrix, where she would have been a man in the real world and a woman while inside the titular virtual world. Though the idea was ultimately dropped from the movie and she was portrayed by Belinda McClory in both worlds, her name remained along with giving her an androgynous presentation as a reference to What Could Have Been.
Literature
- In Durarara!!, Celty likes to keep a low profile by pretending she's a guy in online chatrooms. She's so bad at this that other people don't even realize she's trying to.
- The entire point of ½ Prince; after getting teased about getting everything for free because she's a girl, the protagonist decides to play a boy.
- Played with in Log Horizon.
- Players' avatars were designed based off the face of the actual player, but from there could be modified. So the female character of a male player would look like a female version of them. Unlike SAO, when The Apocalypse hit, characters stayed the same, but spoke in the players' real voice. Thus one of the first things Akatsuki did was to find Shiroe and bum a form change potion off him so she could look like her real self.
- Later, it's discovered that dying causes Adventurers to slowly lose their memories when they respawn, which means any remaining Cross Players gradually start to forget their original gender.
- Even later when a crafting guild figures out a general purpose gender change potion, one of the cross-players mentioned that their voices and mannerisms were starting to change to match their bodies.
- Yun becomes one in Only Sense Online after the game system mistook his gender and generated a female avatar for him. In general, however, this should be impossible. Yun only got that since Shun is sufficiently androgynous-looking.
- In Ready Player One, protagonist Wade has a best friend, Aech, who is a girl with a male avatar. She even gets away with pretending to be male at the in-game school (where students are supposed to use avatars that resemble themselves), because her mother (who had done the same thing) gave fake ID to the school when enrolling her.
- In Shangri-La Frontier, Kei Uomi / Oikatzo plays with both male and female avatars, dependent upon the game. His voice is sufficiently androgynous that it doesn't really mismatch, and it's more a stylistic decision than anything else. In the eponymous game, he plays as a female monk.
- Bert is the only player in Spells, Swords, & Stealth that plays as a character of a different gender. The end result is a man described as being more likely to stuff SS&S players into trash cans than be one himself playing Wimberly, the pint sized gnomish gadgeteer.
- Lampshaded and defied in Sword Art Online, where all Cross Players are forcibly returned to their actual genders when the plot kicks in. It's explained in the novels (but not the anime adaptation) that it was done because of research indicating that too much time crossplaying in a Full Immersion Virtual Reality game can lead to psychological problems relating to mind and body dissonance. This restriction carries over to the majority of games created using The Seed; however, it also notes that because FIVR games determine gender from a user's brainwaves, transgender players are likely to be read as their proper gender instead of their assigned one.
- In Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly, everyone in the main character's party is a real-life friend of his, but he doesn't know which person is behind which character. He seems to have it all figured out early on, but his assumption that the character's gender must match the player's turns out to be wrong.
- A variation occurs in Warrior Cats. ShadowClan are defeated by ThunderClan in a major battle at the end of the novel Fading Echoes. In the next novel, Night Whispers, the ShadowClan cats decide to roleplay the battle and figure out tactics they can use to counter ThunderClan the next time they fight. Oakfur, a tomcat, is chosen to act as the ThunderClan she-cat Hazeltail for ShadowClan's roleplay.
- Welcome to the NHK, where Satou winds up falling in love with a girl he meets online who actually turns out to be his next-door neighbor who wants to convince him that he can't trust women on the internet.
- In A Wild Last Boss Appeared!, the protagonist created Ruphas in part because he liked the idea of a cute girl and then had fun with the roleplaying aspect of things. This becomes a problem when the plot kicks in and he ends up in the "real" world version of the game in her body.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory: One episode had Howard's girlfriend break up with him after she finds out he had virtual sex with a female character online, who turns out to be the university's male janitor.
- In Community the gang plays Dungeons & Dragons and everyone hastily grabs the character sheets Abed had made. This leaves Annie stuck as a character named Hector the Well-Endowed, which Abed had intended for Troy.
- CSI: NY: On Adam's advice, Mac invokes this during "Down The Rabbit Hole" when he investigates the death of a Second Life cosplayer by going into the game with a female avatar (with help from Adam creating it and Stella taking over the dialogue, since Mac is clueless about such things).
- One of the best visual gags in How I Met Your Mother involves a scene showing World of Warcraft. Ted met Blah-Blah online while playing WoW and the scene cuts to two characters conversing. The hulking draenei vindicator saying "we should meet up sometime..." was the girl. Ted was the one playing the scantily-clad female human clothie.
- On Looking Patrick always plays a female character if one is available.
Manhwa
- Yureka: The plot starts when Lotto finds Yureka's ID card and, mistaking it for his own, logs in. Sure, he's confused. This doesn't stop him from messing with his friends a bit, though...
Podcasts
- The Adventure Zone, which has an all-male cast, sees this occur in all the games following the Balance arc.
- Travis plays Aubrey Little in Amnesty.
- In Commitment, Travis plays Nadiya and Justin plays both Irene and Kardala.
- In Dust, Clint plays Gandy Dancer.
- Hey! Jake and Josh:
- There are plenty of characters in Cool Kids Table games whose genders don't match their players. Most commonly Jake, who normally plays as a girl, and Shannon, who normally plays as a guy.
- In Pokémon World Tour: United, Jake plays Rose Jenny (and in this world, the Jenny family are always women).
- Dice Funk: Austin Yorski (male) plays Anne the halfling cleric (female).
- The Tritone Gambit: Rob and Steven (males) play Anya and Rosa (females) respectively.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons has the "Reincarnation" spell, which can sometimes result in a sex change in addition to the usual species change (depending on the edition and GM), leading to this trope occurring at random; of course, it's perfectly possible for players to start their characters out as a different gender on purpose.
Theater
- In the Screen-to-Stage Adaptation Phantasy Star Online 2 -ON STAGE-, Alice's player is Akira, a burly man; while Kazu's player is Kaede, a housewife.
Video Games
- Sakubo of the .hack//G.U. games is a pair of fraternal twins playing the same (female) character.Except it turns out the girl died when they were born and the boy developed a Split Personality as a result of his loneliness and his mother's verbal abuse.
- Pokémon: In Pokémon X and Y, your player character is able to use the PSS (Player Search System) to announce to the world that they're either a guy or girl. Both options are available regardless of your character's actual gender, meaning your character can potentially be a Cross Player if you choose the gender that differs from theirs.
Web Animation
- Dingo Doodles is female but plays as a male monkey named Sips in her Fool's Gold Campaign.
- Puffin Forest once played as a teenaged girl (of the Teens Are Monsters kind) during a Pokémon campaign.
Webcomics
- Angels 2200: Whiskey's online avatar
is male.
- In the modern-day timeline of Arthur, King of Time and Space, the characters meet in an online RPG where both Guinevere and Tristan (who's a girl in that timeline) play male characters.
- Awkward Zombie has a variation in Pokémon-themed strips, where Katie and Norrin dress as the player characters from those games, but in almost all cases they wear the outfit of the other gender character (e.g. Gen 4-centered comics dressing Katie up as Lucas rather than Dawn, or Norrin in Gen 5 wearing a full-pants version of Hilda's clothes rather than Hilbert's).
- Being Fiona: Done accidentally. Felix didn't realise that the Elementalist class he chose in an immersive VR game was limited to female characters. His friend Craig initially invites two other girls to their party assuming they must be guys in the same situation, but that only makes things worse when it turns out that they're actual women. Felix gets too embarrassed and lies, telling them he's a girl called Fiona and making friends with them. From then on, he's stuck playing as female characters as he keeps digging himself deeper.
- Marcus in Chainmail Bikini starts out with a female elf cleric. After she gets a bridge dropped on her due to the party's trapmonkey screwing around, he switches to a nearly identical female elf bard. In strip #6 he tries to explain this predilection as "exploring gender roles within the context of a role-playing environment".
- Both Jim and Annie in Darths & Droids provide examples of this trope, playing Padme and Anakin, respectively in the game versions of the 2nd and 3rd movies of Star Wars. Unsurprisingly, Hilarity Ensues quite often. Ben's little sister Sally tends to play male characters (she takes over whoever the GM needs her to for a given scene) and Pete plays R2-D2, whose "gender" is really a matter of pronouns. (On which note, it's not actually clear whether Sally considers C-3PO to be male, although the other characters she's played certainly are.)
- Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables:
- The male Tiefling rogue wearing a Stripperiffic outfit in the first episode, Luv'Ander, is played by a woman, which serves to add an extra layer of irony to him calling Angela's armor 'sexist'. His body ends up turning feminine briefly in the second episode when Angela and the other Tieflings beat up a Horny Bard.
- Rumples, a masculine and brawny Dwarf fighter, is played by a little girl named Katie.
- El Goonish Shive:
- Tedd uses a female chatroom avatar; unsurprising, considering his penchant for Gender Benders. Tedd would later come out as gender fluid.
- Dan's Author Avatar used to appear as a female anthro squirrel; he switched to male when Elliot was Genderbent. He started using a new avatar in 2022 who is female. Like Tedd, Dan later came out as not identifying as cisgender.
- Goblins:
- It is heavily implied that Drowbabe (and her Suspiciously Similar Substitute Yodette) is played by a guy.
- If Minmax is to be believed, Forgath is played by a girl. He uses this as a justification for kissing him.
- It is heavily implied that Drowbabe (and her Suspiciously Similar Substitute Yodette) is played by a guy
- Larp Trek has several, including O'Brien and Keiko (who decide it would be cute to play each other).
- In Let's Play Abe's Avatar in World of Warquest is female. Only Dallas think it's weird but nobody listens to him anyway.
- In this strip from the webcomic Living with Hipstergirl and Gamergirl Erika tries to hit on a dude in an MMO using her masculine character model, and hilarity ensues.
- Ian of Mac Hall and Three Panel Soul crossplays fairly often, most notably his World of Warcraft character Cherabim and (unwittingly) his Morrowind character Ren. Also Risu from City of Villains or APB. Matt's characters tend to be male, buuuuuuuut...
- In MegaTokyo, all of Piro's videogame and MMORPG characters seem to be female. "Piroko" and "Pirogoeth" are notable examples who appear to have distinct personalities. Miho's character m0h (or Niho) also counts. There is an awkward moment early in the comic when Piro and Miho meet for the first time IRL, considering that Pirogoeth and m0h had a, well, intimate relationship in-game (though according to Piro, not that intimate). Due to game mechanics, this was not entirely by Piro and Miho's choice.
- Tycho in Penny Arcade is famous for only playing as women in Role Playing Games.
- a 2004 arc of PvP had Francis Ottoman playing a catgirl character for many of the same reasons as Dave, below. Ironically, one of his co-workers started to hit on Francis's character before stopping himself, as he already knew it was a Gender Bender character.
- Dave, one of the secondary characters in Real Life Comics, is at one point chided about his preference for playing female MMO characters. He responds that he would much rather spend an MMORPG's requisite hours looking at the back half of a female avatar than a male one.
- What Happens in Carpediem...: Chris is a guy IRL, and plays a cute female avatar.
Web Original
- Jack Pattillo of Achievement Hunter often picks female character models, most notably in their Grand Theft Auto videos. His reasoning is that if he has to look at a character's backside all game, it may as well be one he wants to look at.
- Alpharad's go-to character in Super Mario Bros. Spin-Off titles (such as Mario Kart and Mario Party) is Princess Peach.
- Most multiplayer Mario games played by Brain Scratch Commentaries see Lewis do this. Usually it's as Daisy, but Peach usually gets chosen in games where Daisy isn't playable. One game of Mario Party 2 even had Lewis lampshade how in some of the games Peach and Daisy don't have a change of clothing for certain activities (thus forcing them to participate in said activities in their dresses and high heels).
- For the second campaign of Critical Role, Sam Riegel took a turn as a female character, namely, the little goblin girl known as Nott the Brave who was later revealed to be a halfling, also female, named Veth Brenatto, who was turned into a goblin.
- Equestria Chronicles naturally has this because, well, it's based off a girl's show and most of the players are guys.
- Arin of Game Grumps almost always picks a female character model if given the option, most notably in their playthroughs of Pokémon FireRed and Bloodborne. During the Guild Grumps miniseries, Ross offered Arin the reward of allowing him to change his avatars gender to female if he reached level 94.
Arin: Man, I just wanna be a girl.
- In Games Done Quick runs of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, the often male runners such as Gunnermaniac choose to play as May as it turns out picking May as Norman's child is faster than picking Brendan.
- Valkyrie in The Guild plays at least two different female characters. Codex makes a half-assed attempt to make fun of him for it, though in her webcam she eventually asks herself why she's making a big deal out of it, probably as acknowledgement of how common a practice it is.
- In The Gungan Council, many writers, notably those of Phylis, Relen, and Jessan, frequently write as different genders. It's more common for women on the site to write males, as well.
- JaidenAnimations' go-to character in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is Dry Bowser.
- Several authors of the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions.
- Mario Party TV: Steeler's signature character is Toadette, while Holms often plays as Peach or Birdo and Ky plays Daisy.
- Naka Teleeli is known for playing female characters most of the time when he's given a choice in the games that he plays.
- In Noob, Omega Zell gave it a try to see if it would make getting into a Pick-Up Group easier at some point. The possibility has also been used for quick gags, notably the male avatar to which Omega Zell has been gloating about hating woman turning out to have a female player or the female avatars to which Valentin was speaking to turning out to be that of male players.
- YouTuber omegaevolution tends to play a female avatar when the game he's playing gives him the option.
- Party Crashers:
- In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, TCNick3 is a Lucina main and Sophist is a Zelda main.
- In Super Mario Bros. Spin-Off games, Nick's signature character is Daisy and Vernias' go-to character is Birdo. If Nick isn't playing as Daisy, expect Sophist to play as her instead. If Birdo isn't playable, Vernias will usually opt for Toadette instead.
- In Mario Party Superstars, Sophist's secondary behind Wario is Rosalina.
- In "Mario Party but it's Simon Says" and "Mario Party but it's Simon Says 2", Guest-Star Party Member Peanut plays as Rosalina and Birdo respectively.
- In "I Hired a SECRET Assassin in Mario Party", Vernias plays as Peach.
- In Mario Kart 64, Brent plays as Peach due to having the fastest speed. Toad and Yoshi are tied with Peach in this department, but they were already taken by Nick and Vernias respectively, so this was more of a reluctant choice than anything.
- In "HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS", "TCNick3 got destroyed lmao", and "We RACED in Mario Wonder", Sophist plays as Peach.
- In Mario Golf 64, Sophist plays as Plum.
- In Super Mario 3D World, Sophist plays as Peach and later swaps to Rosalina upon unlocking her.
- In "Mario Kart Wii is TOXIC", Sophist plays as Rosalina. Averted in subsequent Mario Kart Wii videos, where he instead plays as Dry Bowser.
- In Dokapon Kingdom, Sophist's avatar is an "anime lady", as Nick puts it.
- In "We Played EVERY Mario Kart Battle Mode", Sophist plays as Isabelle.
- In "We're never playing Mario Kart again after this...", Vernias plays as Pauline.
- In "We played EVERY Mario Kart track", Sophist plays as Peachette.
- In "We Built a Cult out of Lego", Nick and Brent's avatars are female.
- In WarioWare: Move It!, Nick plays as Ashley.
- In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Sweep the Board!, Vernias plays as Mitsuri Kanroji. Nick gets on his case for choosing the show's Ms. Fanservice.
- In Super Bomberman R, Sophist plays as Aqua Bomber.
- In "we played Mario Party 10...", Vernias plays as Rosalina.
- In Garfield Lasagna Party, Sophist plays as Arlene.
- In "DO NOT LIE IN THIS CARD GAME", Vernias plays as Foxy. Nick judges Vernias for choosing the "sexy fox" character.
- In "Liar's Bar had a TOXIC update...", Vernias plays as Cupcake.
- In WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$!, Sophist plays as Mona.
- In "We tried EVERY Super Team in Marvel Rivals", Brent plays as Storm, Sophist plays as Mantis, and Vernias plays as Invisible Woman and Psylocke.
- In "The WORST Mario Party Clone You NEVER Played", Brent plays as Memetchi and Vernias plays as Violetchi.
- ProtonJon alternates between Waluigi (his main since Mario Party 3, which was Waluigi's debut) and Rosalina (who made her playable Mario Party debut in 10). Rosalina is the one who applies to this trope (at least until April 2025, when she and Waluigi swapped on Jon's transition into Claire).
- Chuggaaconroy of The Runaway Guys in the fifth and sixth Mario Party games played as Daisy, after his choice from the previous games, Donkey Kong, became a non-playable character and a string of Accidental Innuendos regarding Daisy during a Twitch stream of Jon's in 6. After getting blanked twice, he committed to his original plan of changing characters to Toad, though he did have to switch back to Daisy for a Super Mario Party stream, as Donkey Kong wasn't unlocked yet and Toad had switched back to hosting.
- Emile mostly played as the male in his solo Lets Plays of the Pokémon games (of which Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness didn't give him a choice at all). The main exception is his Lets Play of Pokémon Black and White 2, where he opted to play as the female character.
- Justified and downplayed in SBI Rust. Players' avatars in Rust are randomized, and many male streamers end up with female avatars. Other than a few jokes, this is largely ignored.
- Miriam Webster of Something Awful: Dungeons & Dragons is played by the male Medibot. It's never really brought up, and just considered normal.
- Prevalent in Survival of the Fittest, as in 'Applies to almost every single person on the board', prevalent. Almost everybody has characters of either gender. Some handlers are better known for their characters of a gender other than their own, though not everybody can pull this effectively. It shows.
- Sword Art Online Abridged has an odd example: on the roleplay server that is Alfheim Online, Queen Sakuya of the Sylphs and Eugene of the Salamanders are both opposite genders of their players, but that's because those two players used to be in a relationship, had a very messy break-up, and proceeded to steal each other's accounts. Now they're basically playing vicious parodies of each other, with Brian/Queen Sakuya putting on a vapid, posh front while Becky/Eugene acts like a hypermasculine redneck, which has set the tone of the roleplaying for their entire factions.
- That Dude in the Suede outed JewWario as this in a crossover review. Most likely as a joke.
Western Animation
- Kyle is seen playing as a female human in the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft".
Real Life
- Just pick any MMORPG. Even much more if the game does not have Purely Aesthetic Gender since you will have to play as that gender for a particular class, but even if they do, it is still extremely common. In fact, in later games (such as World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, etc), most players will assume the new person they meet is a male behind the PC unless you can convince them you are not (either via voice chat or otherwise). It's common enough that MMORPG has been humorously Backronymed to "Many Men Online, Role-Playing Girls" A common explanation is "If you're gonna spend hours watching someone's ass while they're running around, you might as well make it an ass you want to stare at for hours." Another explanation is being the result of Alt-itis. That is, a player starts with a character of their own gender, but eventually starts new ones that they decide to try different combinations of character traits with, including gender. A new trend in the genre is tying the player characters more closely to the storyline by having them be specific individuals with pre-written backgrounds and Canon personalities. Naturally, this locks their gender as well.
- If you have a powerful enough PC, you can make crossplaying even more authentic by using RVC to change your voice in real time in conjunction with a voice chat system.
- Quite common on Stargate: Aftermath. Most players have multiple characters and a lot have characters of varying genders. Particularly glaring example is SG-6, a team of three men and one woman. All played by women.
- According to Word of God, Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins, like his cartoon alter ego "Tycho" , prefers to play female characters in Role Playing Games.
- Also pretty common in single player RPGs where you create your own character. Many modding communities are built around catering to guys and increasingly girls who want to sexify up their Distaff Avatar.
- Any game with character creation modes for both genders falls into this, really. Shepard's gender in Mass Effect, for example, is entirely the player's choice. Many fans have admitting the use a very simple method to determine whether to play a male or female Shepard by playing the opposite gender from the one they took on their last play-through. (Their Shepard's class is also determined by using a similar metric: they use the next one on the list from their last play-through.)
- Some games such as the Diablo series have a specifically-gendered sprite for each character. Want to zing fireballs around? You've got to play as a female Sorceress. Want to summon the dead to do your bidding? All necromancers are male, sorry. Diablo III, however, has moved away from this trend by allowing players to choose their gender for all classes... and then locked in canon genders in later material.
- Some Nexon-produced games, such as Dungeon Fighter Online and Vindictus, are genderlocked. DFO has moved far away from this, with characters such as the Female Gunner and the Male Fighter, although each gender still has significantly different playstyles in most cases.
- Gold Slam, a Korean- (and for a brief time, American-) produced tennis game had the same idea with only 5 tennis players with their own distinctive looks and biographies to choose from. Want to stay at the baseline and hit the ball really hard? You'll have to be a male character. Want to be unpredictable and quick on your feet? It's a female character for you.
- Some appointed that on average, 40% of the players of either gender Crossplay.
- Gamemasters. While a Player may have their motives questioned when playing a cross-gender character, most don't even give it a second thought that a good gamemaster is expected to play realistic, believable, interesting and even entertaining characters of ANY gender.
