The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 1

"Call me _______."

So might have begun Moby Dick, the video game. All the canon material would refer to the main character as "Ishmael," of course, but the actual audience would have been divided. Some would keep Ishmael, some would name him after themselves, and some would come up with something else entirely.

"Call me Jack."

"Call me Gaheris."

"Call me Batman."

A couple articles I found on Medium Difficulty the other day got me thinking about the more general implications of character selection/creation. It's something we do a lot now, those of us who play games, anyway. It's a literary act. We might divide interactive narratives up this way: the ones that give you one character to play as, the ones that ask you to choose from a stable, and the ones that ask you to build a character yourself.

I hadn't realized before, but with the mainstreaming of video games I think it's safe to say that most people below a certain age have chosen or built a character at some point. World of Warcraft alone accounts for millions upon millions of characters created, and since it has reached its tendrils into distant corners of the culture, it has probably introduced a great many people to the act who otherwise wouldn't have. My cursory search didn't turn up hard numbers on WoW, but City of Heroes (which doesn't hold a candle to WoW) counts 43 million characters created over eight years. So this is a thing that people do.

Video games, more than most any other medium, are venues for the self-expression of the consumer, the audience. A game asks (or tells), "Who will you be?" "What will you do?" and "Can you do it?" These are the questions we, as an audience, ask most media, not the other way around.

Granted, previous generations have also had to choose who they would "play as": cowboys or Indians, cops or robbers, Allies or Axis. (And of course there is Nothing New Under the Sun, but if we made that an end of it, how would we feed the writers?) But never, I suspect, so often and with so many variations. And in these games, you choose your role in your own narrative. To create a whole narrative and then ask the individual audience to choose a protagonist is a quietly radical change.

Especially when we are young, character selection is about self-identification. When we are older, if we still play games, we approach characters in a more jaded manner; we perhaps know better who we are, and look more to try on another skin for a while.

Some games, such as the Legend of Zelda series, only asked me to name my character, but this in itself was a choice that spoke to how I would engage the game. (Link and Ishmael have a lot in common in terms of depth of characterization.) "Cory" fit into the perversely constrained name space of games translated from the Japanese, so I was inclined to use it when a blank-canvas hero needed a modicum of characterization. I did want to be in the game, so it was Cory rather than Link or Crono or Ness. Until, again, I got old and jaded.

There was always, of course, the option of taking the game entirely on its own terms and using the canonical name. (Earthbound is an intriguing exception in that it presented its "canonical" names as fallbacks in case you couldn't think of anything yourself.) Later on I would choose obscure and intriguing names, like Gareth, Nimue, and Arvel, to make the characters mine but not me. Other players (especially of a certain age) took a still different approach, noticing that many vulgarities also fit in the little name box. I never much appreciated this approach, mostly because I got no pleasure from that sort of transgression. I wanted to inhabit the fantasy, not mock it, and there's something a bit lame about being too cool for one's own video games. At any rate, merely letting the player choose the character's name opens up at least four distinct kinds of engagement.

Games of a different sort offered a choice from a small stable of characters. When I was young the choices were simple. I preferred Luigi to Mario when there was little to distinguish them but their palettes. In games where characters had statistics given I gravitated towards the fastest, because I equated speed with finesse and superiority, even though I was myself incapable of finesse.

Street Fighter II, then fighting games in general, broadened the horizons. At least I know of no precedent to the 8, then 12, then 16 playable characters in Street Fighter II's various iterations. Mortal Kombat was anemic in comparison with 7, but still offered a wide array. Between the two of them I developed the heuristic that would determine my character identification for a good long while.

I might stop to mention that back then (in my day) video games had manuals, and these manuals told you a lot more than just how to play the game. In fighting games especially, they contained backstory for all of the playable characters. When I rented a game (these also being the days before manual theft became so pervasive that the game rental outfits gave up entirely on including manuals with rentals) I spent the car ride home poring over this information, determining what I thought of all the characters and who I would play.

Consciously, I chose characters who I saw as morally in the right. Sometimes, as in Mortal Kombat, this had to be a relative judgment. In my mind that was the determining factor. Scorpion was the ghost of a ninja who wanted revenge on Sub-Zero for murdering him and his family; this was the guy I was pulling for. Obviously, in retrospect, moral righteousness was not my only determining factor. Sonya Blade was pursuing a international criminal, and wasn't an undead abomination or a professional murderer. Raiden was a god. But I stuck with Scorpion.

Really it was the monsters, the outcasts, that I was drawn to. I related to Scorpion's inhumanity as well as his sense of grievance. In Street Fighter II, I played Blanka, the feral and inexplicably green jungle warrior. Later, when I played Killer Instinct, I played the werewolf in search of a cure for his condition, or the ice alien who just wanted to go home. In retrospect, I went for monsters first, unless they were explicitly evil. But if someone had green skin and a hunchback, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. (And it always was him, which may or may not say as much about game design as it does about me.)

But these games offered many choices, and many ways to choose: nationality, fighting style, sex (or sex appeal), or purely pragmatic reasons (which character am I most successful with?). One could play a hero or a villain, and being the villain did not mean taking it upon oneself to lose for the sake of the narrative. Fighting games, in fact, were my introduction to the multiple ending--every character's story was different.

This post has gotten quite long, so I will leave it there for now. Character selection was one ritual of my youth, but character creation (when I discovered it) was another, more involved, more expressive, and more suited to its own post in Part 2.