Games and gender identity

Lately I was thinking about 'early signs' I, and others, have missed.
I am not going to analyse my entire childhood and childhood behaviours now, as that is quite a big and complex chunk of information which I do not fully understand myself. Instead, in this post, I will focus on ONE thing that caught my attention lately, namely: gender choice in games.

As a kid/teen I played quite a lot of MMORPG games. I can't stand them now anymore, due the endless grinding and thinning down of friendliness in many game communities, but as a kid I was addicted to them. Majorily to Runescape (seriously, that game was my LIFE from 6/7th grade elementary school to 2nd grade high school), but I also played WoW for a while, even Maplestory and Adventure Quest, and various other non-online RPG games.

My WoW character, a Night Elf Hunter whose name was Asrath

But ONE thing stuck out: I would always play a male character, no matter what. I never thought of it as 'weird' back then, and I did not get as many questions about it as you might think. When someone asked me I either said I didn't like how "oversexed" the women looked (mainly referring to WoW, which has very sexualised characters and gear in general), or said I just "preferred it" or something daft like that.
Funnily enough I had lots of boys (and girls!) tell me technical lego and bionicles are "for boys" and I should not play with them, but surprisingly little people commented that I "should not" pick a male game character. Weird, eh?
At that time I did not even know "why" I always picked a guy. There was no "why", it just "felt right", if you get what I mean. But now I am wondering: was that an early sign? Or doesn't it mean anything at all?

My Runescape character raised some questions in game, though, as his name was Bella Kohler. My first character had my own name, but was "hacked" at level 10 (boo-hoo). In the end I think it was one of my classmates who did it, cause he was the only one who could read English, and we were stupid childish fuckers who knew nothing of gaming, and he had told us to pick our own name + a number as username, and use "ridder" (knight in Dutch) as password.
Stupid kiddos that we were, we listened to him. (ROFL!)
So I created a new character, which needed a new name. I did not want numbers in my name this time, and my dad suggested to name my character after my favourite plush dog, "Bella", which then again was named after my favourite childhood dog. I did not think it was "odd" to have a male character named Bella at that time at all. In fact, I saw Bella as a unisex name at that time, and also saw my plush dog as male.
Sometimes I'd change my hair colour, or even skin colour (I loved dark/toned skin), but never his gender, unless necessary for a quest, because that didn't "feel right".

I am the guy in the middle, those two others were friends

I also made both my WoW and Runescape character into comic characters, and wrote a lot of comics especially about Bella, in which he accidentally got "zapped" into the Runescape world, and then later on could travel between the real world and "game world" at will. Basically that was just a big fantasy/dream of me at that time, which I could 'live out' through the comics and drawings.

A picture from an old (traditional) drawing of Bella as a comic character (as you can see he wore his kilt, uhh I mean skirt, traditionally! ;P)

He was basically a persona of myself, and in many ways he was a lot like me, but more exaggerated or ideal (he was clumsy and messy, but his clumsyness often produced answers and solved problems rather than the opposite)
Basically he was who I wanted to be. Then how come I did not even think this was 'weird' or 'a sign' or anything like that at the time? How could I have been so blind?
Honestly? I don't know. I don't understand my own brain most of the time, honestly.

My newest drawing of him, depicted as the dog that originally carried his name. I deliberately made him look more or less androgynous, to emphasise the analogy between myself and him

I also always drew almost exclusively male characters, often the only females where my female friends (who were often also featured in the stories I wrote).
I still remember I used to create many other comic characters with a friend (sadly I lost the drawings of them), and then one of my female friends would always use their designs for a female form of my characters (she always asked first whether I was okay with that though, and didn't claim she made the design, etc.)
I never thought it was odd she did that. Nor did I ever think it was odd I only identified with males. (odd isn't it?)
Later I thought it had to be due the over-abundance of male heroes and main characters in popular media, and that I had just lacked "strong female role models", but when I look back at it... I had plenty, but just did not SEE them. It is true men seem to dominate games, movies and books, but that does not mean strong and badass women are absent either (and that's good, because I don't like sexism or stereotyping. Not at all)

Later in my teens things would become even a bit more confusing though, but that story is for another time, another day and another blog post.