I never consider my characters in any of my games to be my "avatar" in that game. I never think that in any way are any of my characters a representation of me. This frees me up to do things like have female characters. I have a number of characters in World of Warcraft, and all are female. If I'm going to be wandering around in a virtual world all day, with my character in plain sight 100% of the time, I want something that's at least somewhat appealing to the eye, or whatever the next best thing is. That is why I play female characters. If I'm playing a game where I don't see my character ever, or if the graphics are so low detail that you can't even tell, then I'll play a male character. It's all about looks.

Getting back to this non-avatar thing, I don't refer to my characters in the first person. When I talk about Maura, my primary World of Warcraft character, I say "her" and "she", sometimes even calling her by name. To me, she is a character with a personality independant of my own. What that personality may be, I'm not really sure, because I don't tend to role play. This, however, does not prevent me from giving my character a personality if I so desire. Take the case of another character I have, whose name is "Kawaiineko", which is basically bad Japanese for "cute cat". She is very cute visually. As such, I decided to give her a cute personality. I've watched enough anime to know how she should act to be cute, and I'll often have her enact those traits. She can be naive, silly, and just plain pettable. She's the kind of girl that you'd want snuggled up to you in your lap. Well, maybe that's just me.

Despite the fact that I've given this character a personality, and that she acts a certain way, she still doesn't represent me. I'm simply writing a character as I would in a fiction story. It's a skill I believe I am good at, and in fact I think that this manner of role playing actually helps me develop my character-writing skills. As such, playing video games like World of Warcraft isn't just a waste of time, it's a method of practice!