Friday, February 4, 2011
Characters & Avatars
I've been wondering as a gamer what our characters and avatars say about ourselves. In the comments Fiona said that my updated Eve character looked a bit like me and yet personally I don't see it, that was not the intention. I wonder is it a sub-conscious thing that we can't help putting ourselves in these characters? I've often got an intention behind a face or character but I wonder if that ever actually shows. I re-use names sometimes (I'd forgotten too that I actually just called one of them Doon) but I usually try to keep them fairly unique, of course that's easier for non-humans. I decided I'd put together a gallery of my recent characters and see what people thought. These are only from games where you have a reasonable control of facial features and ones that I currently have installed. Oblivion is the oldest game represented, if you go much futher back than that there wasn't as much control. The most you got in the mid-era of gaming was a selection of different heads and hairstyles which you could mix and match. The first thing I noticed when putting them side by side was how similar my two Shepards were (Mass Effect 2). I hadn't realised that before. My Fallout characters are quite close as well but that's for two reasons. First is the hats and glasses but that's a roleplaying reason, they live in a nuclear desert wasteland. Second the Fallout character system doesn't have as many options as some of the others. So what do my avatars say about me?
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Very interesting indeed. For a start, I never realised you had made so many, and secondly, it is quite astonishing what complex choices can now be made by the player, as you showed us in MoG. I am impressed by your designs, because they all look like real people, you have resisted the temptation to go for 'perfect' and that says a lot about you, ie you are not vain, you are realistic and also that these characters mean something to you, you want them to be people you can believe in. The female characters have the looks that I am guessing you would be happy with, were you really that person, and it is interesting that there there is more variety and in general they are more conventionally attractive than the male characters. Especially Arwill. Also the two Shepards who made me smile because they look like female commanders in a Sci-Fi show, ie they look like actresses! (That is always my complaint. Actresses lool like actresses, and women who succeed in a man's world look like Dame Ellen Arthur, for example. Never works!) Anyway, back to the avatars, the male ones. There must be a bit of subconscious alignment with reality going on, I think, because many of them have beards, and all of them look as if they would be pretty tall, for example, and they all have dark hair and dark eyes. I can see something of you in all of them except Landren, who looks more lost and waif-like, and Desper Moonar who looks exactly like Hugo Weaving in LOTR! (But even he has long dark hair, which you did once!)
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