Few days ago I made a post here about me questioning my gender identity and comments there gave me a courage to experiment a bit. I decided to try playing some video games as female characters to see how it goes. I found that to be safest way to do it because it isn't about changing my appearance. Results are different than I'd like to admit but I will share them (as well some other ways I'll experiment with gender in the future) as a way of documenting.
I wanted to start with something more subtle so I picked Pokemon, more specifically Emerald version that I didn't play before. Gender of a character doesn't do much to change experience since it's a pretty old game. Most notable thing that I got from here is little animation before each battle where your characters moves on the screen, it felt kinda nice to have a girl there.
Second game was Bayonetta. This was my first time playing this. Only reason why I picked this is because I knew that main character is a female and I wanted to try it. Unlike Pokemon it is much more obvious that main character is female so my feelings about that were stronger too, it was pretty comfortable. Feelings I got from playing as a female character were actually the best part of the game for me (at least from a small part that I played).
Last game I picked is Palworld. Unlike first two games I already played this one for about 2 hours total with a male avatar so this was a great way to compare expirience. To be honest, it was better playing as a female and I got more motivation to play the game again. Gameplay itself was pretty much the same but with that one change it felt better. I deleted my first world with male avatar and will continue playing on this new one.
While doing all this I remembered few games where I already used female characters for pretty much no reason but didn't think about it until now.
In Mario Kart Wii I always use Daisy. Best character and vehicle combinations in this game use Funky kong and Daisy with Funky kong being better one. Funky kong was my first main but at one point I wanted to try Daisy and continued to use her, she felt better to play but I couldn't explain why.
While I was playing Super Mario Bros Wonder I switched my character to Daisy at one point for no reason and completed one world with her, returning to playing Luigi after that. In Mario games where you can use more characters I normally just pick my favorite one and use it entire game, Luigi is my favorite character from Wonder's roster and I'm not a Daisy fan so this didn't make any sense at the time.
When I played one mobile gacha game I mostly used female characters. My character choices were based on the playstyle and I used some male characters too but something always felt kinda off with them.
What I got from all this is pretty interesting and something I didn't expect to this degree. Honestly, I have a hard time seeing myself picking a male character in the future in any game where you have choice. And I can say for certain that there is no sexual attraction here (like playing a female character just to looks at her but), while playing there weren't any thoghts like that and I don't feel any kind of attraction towards fictional characters. Combining all of this with me having few experiences that I can describe only as physical dysphoria in those few days things become much clearer. Next step for me will be to try using she/her pronouns online and see how that goes but I want to wait a bit so my brain can process everything. While I'm aware that this showed that probability of me being trans is really high (maybe even 100%) I still can't admit that to myself, all of this is just too mindblowing to proces.
I'm from Balkans, it's not very LGBT friendly place.