This is the second and final part of my article on the question posed by the GDC panel “What Colour is Your Hero?”. In the first part I spoke, as the panel did, about the representation of ethnic characters by developers in games. This time I’m going to take the question more literally and talk about player created characters, including my own personal choices.
Anyone who read either my Mass Effect 2 Review or my follow up probably noticed that my Shepard isn’t the usual ‘default male Shepard’ or one of the many interchangeable female Shepards one sees in a review of this kind, he’s black. Anyone who actually knows me is also aware that I’m not. I’m aware that is probably very unusual, so what I’m going to try and do here is ruthlessly psychoanalyse myself in order to figure out why.
First the mandatory background. I’m that most overrepresented of people, the straight white male (the Saints Row 2 avatar above is actually a proper representation) I also grew up in Birmingham, which (for our non Brit readers) is the most ethnically diverse city in the UK. At every point of my life I have been surrounded by ethnic minorities, mostly black or Indian/Pakistani/Bangledeshi. I may not be a minority, and as such it’s probable that I can never fully understand what it feels like to be a victim of discrimination, but I have grown up with these people and I have never seen racism as anything other than both absurd and deplorable.
Nevertheless, it’s a big step from there to identifying with a black avatar more than one that resembles myself, how did this happen?
My Avatars:
I’ve been heavily into RPGs throughout my gaming life, something which really began with Bioware’s seminal Baldur’s Gate 2. BG2 had pretty primitive customisation options, you simply picked a character portrait and tried in vain to construct an avatar that even vaguely resembled it. Although I tried several different characters over while trying to play the game, one of the ones I used most expensively was a character with the face of NPC Valygar, because he looked cool and I had no intention of bringing him with me. Later on I played Neverwinter Nights and, with the aid of a portrait pack, I managed to bring Valygar back, this time using a model that fit him better.
Fast forward to Knights of the Old Republic, where things really began to kick off. Character customisation still hadn’t really taken off at the point, you chose between a series of heads that were attached to a default body. I thought most of the heads looked fairly goofy, so in the end I settled on the image of young, black man with a shaved head, one of the few faces I thought fit the part. There’s a big twist in the plot of KotoR, which I won’t mention here, but it affected the way I approached the game greatly. I’d been idling along, doing some good, some bad, usually trying to avoid the more cartoonist evil moments, until the twist struck and suddenly I felt as if the whole world expected me to go bad, to take the easy way out, to fall to the dark side, it seemed so easy, so simple to do so, but I could not. Some part of me decided, possibly purely because it seemed so perverse in the situation, that I would not fall, I would not even compromise, it didn’t matter what the rest of the galaxy thought, I was going to do good, because it felt right.
KotoR 2 would elaborate further. I choose a similar face believing I would be playing the same character (you don’t) and was thrown into a much darker world, with many more shades of grey. In KotoR 2 you play a character exiled from the Jedi after he fought to help worlds under attack, despite the council pledging not to interfere. Every other Jedi who did this turned to the Sith but you came back and stood judgement. At one point you come back and stand once more before the council that judged you get a chance to defend yourself anew, it was at that point that the hero I played became whole, when I stood there saying I would do the same again given a chance. The attitude of doing right, no matter what the consequences with authority stuck with me, and that become the hero I gravitated towards time and time again.
KotoR 2 also became another turning point, it was the first time someone else noticed, and commented on the fact that I tended to play black characters. It became something of an in joke, an affectation. It bled into other games, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Rainbow 6, I picked Louis every time in Left4Dead (and later Coach in Left4Dead 2) I became acutely aware of how many character creation tools, especially those from earlier games, had disappointing or missing options for other races. Over time the tools became more sophisticated, I began to refine the appearance of my characters, I liked to stay bald, as my KotoR character had been, but I added a beard, which offset the lack of hair somewhat.
It was Mass Effect that really made me sit back and realise what I was doing. Perhaps because my character’s occupation, Spaceship Captain, was the same. It was then that I realised that I had, slowly but surely been crafting my hero into a facsimile of one of the heroes of my youth.
Secret Origin:
Embarrassing childhood story of the day; one of my earliest memories is of my mother taking me to a barbers and me asking if I could get a hair cut like Linford Christie, I literally couldn’t understand that my hair wouldn’t do that. I admired Linford as an athlete, and although I presumably processed that his skin was a different colour that was all I was aware of, as a child at least, I was colour blind.
My earliest heroes, like most children I think, were wild and fantastic Disney heroes and James Bond, simple, uncomplicated, always victorious. As I grew older I desired more complexity in my heroes (although I always retained a fondness for Bond) I looked around me and I saw boy scouts and clichéd anti-heroes. Either simplistic do-gooders unchallenged by the perfect worlds they found themselves in, or cynics who were no greater than the dark world that surrounded them, and were heroes simply by default.
It was at that point that I found Captain Sisko.
I’d watched Star Trek before of course, and I in no way want to downplay the excellence of some of the other characters in that series, but Sisko felt different. He wasn’t a supernaturally calm as Picard, or as ridiculously pugnacious as Kirk. He was fallible, he was capable of surprising darkness, at times he seemed to be struggling to keep himself in check in extreme situations. In short he felt human, he felt like a real man with heroism inside of him, rather than a hero who had little in common with me. Sisko wasn’t the first hero of this kind I encountered (that honour goes to Sir Samuel Vimes, who as a literary construct did not have a strong visual to imprint upon my young mind) nor would he be the last (later I would become aware of characters like Philip Marlowe, and of course Batman). Not all these characters are the same, but they all contained aspects of particular concept of heroism in my mind of ordinary men faced with tough worlds often in a position of iniquity, who did good because it was not within then to stand idly by. Although I didn’t know it at the time Sisko’s visage had indelibly attached itself to this notion of heroism.
Outside Reactions:
It’s only relatively recently that my gaming habits have been opened up for public scrutiny, and it’s been interesting to see the reaction of others to by avatar habits.
My university flatmates were the first to pick up on it, to them it was a bizarre quirk, an affectation, an in joke. Another (male) flatmate always played women with red hair, this was treated in a similar fashion, although less explicable (mine did not obviously relate to my taste in partners). I joked about it too, the word ‘badass’ might have been used on more than one occasion.
You might have seen the name ‘Shaft Shepard’ attached to my Commander Shepard around the place. This is not something I came up with, he’s always been called Dante (my old net handle) Shepard in my games. I understand that his fine beard might seem somewhat reminiscent of a exploitation movie, but it seemed odd that so many people quickly spouted comments like “they should have a Samuel L Jackson voice just for you”. I’d never really considered Shepard to be that kind of character, he wasn’t a Samuel L Jackson anti-heroic badass. He was a man of nobility in a tough world, he was a Sisko, yet there was the assumption, from the appearance, that this would be so.
I never made any assumptions about my Shepard, I just thought it was a cool look for a character onto whom I projected my own ideas of heroism.
Y Tu?
I can never be sure what kind of connection people have with their avatars, and how deep it lies. I’ve read articles from several other gamers with habits that vary wildly from mine. Others enjoy playing games as evil psychopaths or bumbling incompetents, not to mention the strangely large number of male gamers that play as women. The “If I’m going to have to stare at someone’s butt” explanation usually comes up here, but it’s not something I’ve ever understood, why on earth would I objectify my own avatar? It’s supposed to represent me after all.
It makes me wonder, do we all have a tale like this? Or is it only some of us? John Walker and Richard Cobbett are clearly deeply connected with the narrative of the games they play, yet play as women. Do they have similar experiences in their past, similar heroes that inspired them, that have lead to this choice?
In the end, I think most people probably play games with an avatar that resembles them in some way, but those of us that don’t, when we really think about it, might have some interesting tales to tell.
When I saw your Sheppard I thought of Sysko.
In games with no default, as an mmo, I use to play with females with red hair too, I laughed a lot when I saw your comment on your flatmate.
In the rest, I use to play with the defaults. I somehow trust the developers in making a good design choice to fit in the character and the game as a whole.
In Mass Effect I didn’t even notice I could change Sheppard appareance, much less make a redhair woman. I’ve watch videos of a female sheppard, or very different male ones, and I think they all give the very same sensation, mostly due to both great voice actors.
Im thinking… is there any game with a “minority” set as a default?
I’m in the redheaded female protagonist club, too. This could be precipitated by a combination of factors:
*Genetically, a white redhead is about as far as I can get from myself.
*I watched the X-Files and have a fondness for Dana Scully.
*My wife is a redhead, though I played as ginger females before I even met her.
*There’s the stereotype for feistiness (no comment) associated with redheads that suits the way I roleplay.
I’d like to see a game with no character creation other than a big red button with ‘good luck’ written on it; pressing it randomly generates your character’s appearance, race and gender and you just have to live with whatever pops out. Far more true to life. Naturally, you’re only allowed one press per play-through.
Gamers are give sycophantic levels of choice these days when it comes to character creation. I think there’s room for games to be a little more dictatorial.
I think there’s a lot to be said for character creation increasing the immersive qualities of a game. I feel closer to a character if I made him look like that – I even recorded my own voice pack for my Baldur’s Gate character that I carried through the expansions and sequel too.
Being an old fan of the Final Fantasy series, it was sometimes hard to stay connected to the story because you where always presented with your character and it was their story you where following. You were always an outsider. Western RPGs usually always give you a choice of who to be which involves you in the story.
When I play Zelda I’m always Link, but when I played Baldur’s Gate I was Badgerface, son of Bhaal.
That’s fascinating. It helps you with immersion? Somehow I think that an avatar that actually responded to me in my voice would totally destroy my immersion. I consider them a specific subpart of myself, not my ‘main’ self – sort of like a limb. If they tried to pretend they were actually ‘me’, it would push the difference into too sharp a contrast and break my connection.
That being said, I used to customize my avatars to at least slightly look like me. Not to be me, but more as sort of a fractal principle – any subpart of me would naturally resemble me after a fashion.
The most recent game where I could choose was actually Mass Effect 1, and at the time I was already aware of the dialogue around gender and racial representation, so as an experiment I decided to play as a young (late twenties) black female Shepard – I myself am The Great Vanilla, a young white hetero male with a Christian cultural background. I named her Grace, because it’s a lovely name, and she looked like a Grace. Also I knew I’d play her as a Paragon. I also didn’t go for anything overtly attractive or sexualized.
And let me tell you, it’s quite something, though maybe not in the way I thought. I don’t identify with her as I did with my previous avatars, but it doesn’t break immersion – it makes me think of her as a character. She isn’t me, she is Grace Shepard, hero of Mass Effect. It does wonders for story immersion, because when you have an actual protagonist you see the story through their eyes, which helps you get involved – whereas if you play as yourself it’s an invitation to stay detached and metagame.
I did play her as an Infiltrator, which is my favorite sci-fi build – my Fallout 1 and 2 chars were Agents (high CHA and INT, Small Guns and a lot of Critical Hits, etc.) But character builds are gameplay-centric, while appearances are story-centric.
That certainly sounds like an interesting concept Paul. I think it would require a little more response to your appearance than you get nowadays though.
As I wondered in the last article, it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to code in some specific lines dictated by the chosen skin tone at appropriate moments. It would be interesting to see something try it.
With your idea you could take it even further, and have the game respond to your differently depending on how attractive your randomly generated face is.
Or further still by including characters with racial, class and gender prejudices. Tough subject to approach. I guess Dragon Age is touching upon it at arms length using a fantasy setting, or so I’m lead to believe – I’ve not actually played the thing.
It really is fairly arms length.
My first character (see below for general description) was an elven mage. There were a few sort of “oh an elf as a mage?” type comments thrown my way to which I could respond with belligerence (fuck you human type answers) or more diplomatically. While these did sort of remind you of the issues the game tried to create it just seemed a bit tacked on to the start of the conversation. I guess it would be pretty complex to do do more elaborately but it would have been nice if it had felt a little less tacked on.
I can’t speak the Mage, but the City Elf and Dwarf Commoner origins stick with you throughout.
I share Tom’s attitude in gravitating towards actions where I see my character as “doing right” and being strongly bound to their moral code. There, however, our similarities end.
Give me a in depth character creator and I’ll always create a woman.
I think it’s perhaps because there’s so few games with female leads but these games have tended to stick in my mind (Tomb Raider 2, Lngest Journey, Beyond Good and Evil). I guess having played so many games with male leads I just fancy a change. If there’s an option for a name she has always been called Dana. I have no idea why, perhaps I just subconciously followed in the short and (with he exception of Jade) dual syllabic nature of the character’s names in the games I previously mentioned. Perhaps I just thought it sounded cool. I can’t really remember. I always aim to make a character who looks pretty as well. Ohm and brunette. Just because.
If there’s a skill system involved I always tend to heavily lean my character towards persuasiveness and intelligence rather than combat. I guess I like to think the lassie can sweet talk her way out of any situation.
Also I like Paul’s idea of a “good luch” button to an extent. It would probably actually have an affect on the way I play a game. For example if I ended up with a character with a stereotypically evil looking mustache I doubt I’d be able to play him as anything other than a conniving, scheming bastard!
Hmm, I appear horribly typo prone today. Proof that revision only serves to fry my brain!
Perhaps you sometimes need a forced dislocation from your character that random appearance generation may allow – as you say, it might encourage you to play differently, not taking the “good” path our ethics are usually attracted to.
It wasn’t so much them considering how you played the character that caused them to spout things like that, just we all like to make a bit of weak humour. Are we seriously suggesting that he should have the voice of a well known black star? No, not really. But it is humourous to suggest and think so.
I think it would be interesting to be able to have the main character as an Indian (not the American kind) for a bit of variety, if you want to talk about a supremely under-represented race.
I wasn’t really suggesting it Ed, I just thought it was interesting that it was the first joke anyone reached for.
I would assume that Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi (I am always careful not to confuse them, they don’t get on) is under-represented to us because the UK has a much higher proportion of immigrants from that area, while the US gets more from the Far East. Hell I still have trouble with the fact that ‘Asian’ where I come from means ‘Indian subcontinent’ whereas in Hollywood lexicon it means ‘Oriental’.
I’m racking my brains here and I can only really think of Farah from Prince of Persia as a major Indian Asian character. The only time I’ve actually played as one was commanding the Maratha Confederacy in Empire.
I often found myself making a hot female, and I do honestly believe the “if I’m going to be staring…” argument. At the same time I am strongly attached to the decisions I make and the worlds I visit.
I think it’s because there are two separate phases to using an avatar in a game – the parts where you act and interact with other characters and the environment, where you play through your avatar; and the parts where you play dress-up – Combining gear, assigning stats, appearance sliders and moral choices etc. When it comes time to interact my mind is in no way focussed on how I look, but how my target looks, and what I need to be doing to achieve objective x. My avatar is me and usually this is because it doesn’t really matter what your appearance is, everyone treats you the same apart from the odd ‘she’. In the downtime, there’s not much else to look at but my character’s girly butt.
Well, I’m in the female-avatar-male-gamer club (at least on first playthroughs – with Bioware RPG’s at least I tend to play through a second [and sometimes third... or fourth...] time, at which point I experiment with other backgrounds and sexes), and it’s for a collection of reasons. Worth noting here – I’m a ‘narrative gamer’, in the same way Walker is – I like to embed myself in my games’ storylines. And yes, I can vouch for the fact he’s not alone in the ‘cried at a game’ camp… *cough*
Anyway, reasoning:
I’m sure that on some level it is to do with simple objectification, which shames me.
But primarily, it’s to do with gender identity, or rather the way that modern (Western?) society encodes certain personality traits as feminine or masculine. I am generally considered an effeminate person, and that’s something I’m comfortable with. I have ‘masculine’ traits, for sure – being a gamer (not in the sense of just playing games, but in the hobbyist, taking a direct interest in them sense) is probably the most obvious. But I have no ‘macho’ attributes: I am deeply noncompetitive, quiet, bookish, romantic, and a slew of other such traits that see me culturally coded as female.
And even though I know all that’s bullshit – I’m acutely aware that I’m male, I’m also very aware that many, many women possess personalities that would see them coded as male – it has gradually coloured my own perception of myself to the point where I can’t help but imagine the best representation of myself in a game to be a female. Which is to say, I’m stereotyping women in representing myself as one. Wonderfully, perversely sexist, I know.
I chop and change. When I was much younger I always tried to create an avatar that mimicked myself. However then I got into the habit of purposely trying to add a bit of variation. My Shepard was black and female, and is probably one of my favourite characters I’ve played an an RPG. In the original Fallout I played a white male, as it felt most appropriate for the 50s setting, although in the sequel I was a Hispanic male and then white female in the third game. In the KotOR games I stuck with the canon, male in the first, female in the second. I actually can’t remember the race of my character in the first game, although think I was white.
I’m a black male from the US, and I’ve had a certain style in games.
In FPS where I can choose an avatar (example: Unreal Tournament), I tend to play a black male. I have also tended to make character names to represent minorities picked on by other players online. So my characters have had names such as “Uppity Negro,” “Avenging Jew,” and “Your Gay Lover.” I do it specifically to annoy racists, homophobes and anti-semites (as I tend to be a top 5% player) to have it thrown in their face that they are getting crushed by someone they have decided to hate. Makes my day slightly better.
In MMOs where I can fully design an avatar (example: City of Heroes), I have played white males, black males, and white females. The most interesting part of this (to me) is that I realized I have never designed a black female character, which says something about what I relate to (black male) and what I maybe think of as a far step that allows me to pretend (white males and females). I wonder if black women are in the uncanny valley for me.
I have tended to avoid designing Asian and Hispanic characters because I dread working on skin tones. :)
I’ve wondered that myself, as a white male who often plays as black males, yet rarely white women. I guess that means I see my gender identity as more important than my racial identity.