Leadership in WoW, does gender matter?

[David van Gent]

We had a symposium on leadership in virtual worlds recently, where research done by Utrecht University showed that it matters, if your avatar is male/female in World of Warcraft. As a male avatar you get more leadership tasks to fulfill, than as a woman. This could easily be verified by a male or female playing 2 avatars of the opposite sex. You can watch the recorded symposium (broadcasted live in Second Life as well) --> http://www.eduverse.org/index.php/symposium2/

[Sharon Collingwood / Ellie Brewster]

I've been thinking about this post for a while now, but hadn't had a lot to respond -- I tried to see what WOW was all about a year ago, and I got tired of killing pigs really fast. I'm not belittling it, I just mean that I didn't connect with it at all, and felt constrained in what I could do (that's a gender question on its own, I think, although there are a lot of women in WOW).

I don't know if you're on the SLed list, David, but there's a group starting up of people interested in or playing WOW. Look for messages with the subject line "WOW shout out," posted after Oct 2.