MMOs would benefit from more playable furries

Ever since I started blogging on Destructoid, I’ve not bothered to keep it a secret that I’m part of the furry fandom. I mean, yeah, it’s weird to say I like pretending to be a giant moth man with extraneous kaiju-like features, but have you seen everyone else here? Destructoid is a bunch of lovable weirdos!

For obvious reasons I’ve downplayed it since I became a front page contributor, but I continue to own it because, well, that’s just me being honest about my other hobbies (not to mention some of my favorite artists who identify with the fandom like Marc Knelsen and Alberto Hernández are responsible for some pretty exciting work on games). I enjoy donning the online persona of an anthropomorphized insect. That's why I feel slightly disappointed that I can’t find a single MMO where I can play as a sufficiently insectoid bug person.

People play MMOs for many reasons, but one that’s rarely discussed is to express oneself in a massive community. Hence the joke of people spending hours in character creation fine-tuning their avatars to be exactly what they want them to be -- because that avatar is a part of their in-game identity in a sea of never-ending players. One of the quickest decisions in that process is selecting a race or a species due to how broadly that impacts everything else. It’s also one of the most important parts of defining a player's connection to their character identity.

Obviously, not every MMO even needs a race selector. They run the gamut of genres and premises, many of which don’t fit anything other than humans, and I think we can agree humans are a rad species (not that we humans are biased or anything). But the vast majority of MMOs are themed around various fantasy settings, drawing upon imagination to create worlds where magic, sentient AI, or other such conventions are accepted as a universal norm, as are any creatures that depend on those conventions to exist. And yet their playable rosters mostly stick to humanlike archetypes and neglect possibilities that players such as myself find much more interesting, even when other such races are written as a vital part of their worlds.

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