The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

I've thought recently about just how many characters I've invented--not as a writer but as a player of video games and role-playing games. It is more than many but fewer than some. That's the point I was getting at in my last post: that the act of choosing and creating characters is becoming a common and frequent cultural experience. It means something to make these choices. At the very least it reflects something in us.

Video games are becoming a major way that people interact with stories. It's worth noticing, then, that it's often the role of the player, not the designer, to create the protagonist. Halo and its iconic Master Chief rose and fell in the last decade. The hero of the games we play today is mutable.

Granted, this trend is largely the work of a few studios, but Bioware, Bethesda, and the caretakers of MMORPGs are doing a lot more than their share of the storytelling.

Truly granular character creation has become a hallmark of western RPGs. These are really the video game equivalent of the bildungsroman, with the player's hand on every brick as it comes down. The whole game might be a character creation mode: the first hour or so is spent defining the character in broad strokes such as sex, name, appearance, and aptitudes; the next 20 to 100 hours are spent deciding how the character reacts to various scenarios.*

I confess that, from everything I've heard, I could speak more authoritatively on this subject if I had played the Mass Effect games. There, I am told, is a rich narrative that changes profoundly based on the choices you make about and with your character, not just a world you move through in a set direction making cosmetic choices as you go. When I have $100 and 100 hours to spare I will look into this further.

I actually came to truly intensive character creation through wrestling games. (There was a run of very good wrestling video games in the late 90s that you didn't need to care for actual professional wrestling to enjoy.) I could spend hours on that, building a ridiculous costume piece by piece, and choosing exactly what kind of punch my character threw when I pushed the button this way or that way. The legitimately boggling slider festival that opens Skyrim is comparatively manageable.

But one of these is more like sculpture and the other is more like writing. Role-playing video games adapted the free-form character crafting of their tabletop forebears and combined it with the cosmetic characterization element. The upshot was that you could make yourself a character in the story, either in the sense of making one for yourself or making one out of yourself. With an amount of obsessive application that's hardly even abnormal in this day and age, one could create a Tussaud-quality likeness for their in-game avatar. And of course these are almost all fantasy role-playing games, meaning you choose an "class" for your character such as a wizard, a warrior, or a thief.

So here there is no stable of characters to choose among, but a whole spectrum of possibility. What do we choose? I almost always used myself as a model. My own given name--not Cory, the other one--was suitably exotic to suit a fantasy protagonist.

So when I discovered the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate 2 my first character was a sorcerer named Corodon, Neutral Good by alignment and apt to talk his way out of danger when he could. He was an elf, and his skin was blue (not drow indigo, but more cyan) so he was suitably bizarre, but otherwise he was who I wanted to be in the game. With class a variable, and skin color brought back within the bounds of normalcy and self-identification, this continued to be my first character in games I've played of the same sort until today, more or less.

Oddly, I didn't follow the selection heuristic I mentioned in my last post. My characters tended to be idealized versions of myself. After the blue skin experiment, I didn't take the opportunity again to make a character alien or monstrous, even when the Elder Scrolls games made it a viable option.

The penchant for charismatic characters comes partly from the sort of morals I wanted to play and partly from the practicalities of the games themselves. Bioware in particular filled its games with lavish dialogue trees, so that talking your way out of (or into) a situation was always at least interesting. I wanted to be able to talk my way through trouble because I wanted to see how the game would handle it--the story that got told that way was more interesting to me than the one where every problem got solved through fights.

The idealized self was my go-to through about halfway through Dragon Age, two years ago. That's when I looked at my digital "self" and found myself profoundly bored with him. Instead of stepping into the character's place in the world, I was out here, looking at a character who, because he had no real differences from me, was a blank. I, the audience, liked or disliked characters, and approved or disapproved of developments, but my protagonist didn't: he was a vessel, not a character. Also his face, which was sort of like mine but not quite, got very hard to look at after a while.

Such is the danger of this type of association. It also runs up against the frustrations of finite character choices. This turned me off Mass Effect very early on. My protagonist was me, according to me, but I often had to make decisions where what I would have done wasn't an option. This made the story that the game was willing to tell more galling than engrossing.

My friend Bryan found a solution of sorts. In Mass Effect he modeled his character not on himself, but on Edward James Olmos, best known to us as William Adama in Battlestar Galactica. The likeness was only approximate, but what he found was a face with character--and not his own. So when the character followed Bryan's instructions in a way he didn't expect, the result was a surprising development that revealed something of the character's character, not a failure of the interface.

Naturally I stole the idea. I confess that it has done less for my experience of Skyrim than I had hoped. But then as a writer I have always been greedy for dictatorial, rather than merely interpretive, control over stories I participate in.

I never get the same sense of flamboyant self-expression from most RPGs that ask me to build a character as opposed to the ones that ask me to choose one.

The most freedom I can remember in character creation was in a plucky Telnet game called RetroMUD. Being entirely text-based, a player described their character's appearance in words, meaning practically anything was possible. The game also offered a truly preposterous array of races (including dragons, titans, atomies, robots, and squid) and more character classes than it's really safe to think about. Just writing about RetroMUD actually makes me want to play it again, not because it was good as a game or I was any good at it, but because it is a world where you can really be someone, and that someone is almost anyone.

But really, RetroMUD is so much text-based that playing it is almost like writing. It teeters on the far edge of the continuum between Reading and Writing, where the big guns of gaming stay, ultimately, tethered to the Reading end by the authorship of the designer.

* I say "deciding" somewhat pointedly. Rare (in my experience) is the game where doing the "right" thing is really more difficult than the alternative. Bioshock came close with the choice of saving or harvesting the little sisters, but couldn't resist compensating you more or less in-kind for the resources you gave up by sparing them. But fictional interactive ethics aren't quite a topic for today.