Multiverses, Gender Stereotypes in

The roles that men and women occupy in what has come to be known as the multiverse-that is, various graphical online environments such as EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or Second Life (which is more of a social virtual world than a game)-have been a matter of much debate and even more confusion and misunderstanding. The central issue of gender in virtual worlds seems to be whether the practices of gender stereotyping have been appropriated by the various online communities or whether, given the relative creative freedoms and anonymity of the multiverse, they have also begun to fade. This article addresses the questions of whether gender stereotypes exist in the multiverse and, if they do, what forms they tend to take. First, the persistence ...