Alexandra wrote below on games, mainly RPGs, that let you create a character and thus let you win "as a specific character". What's interesting is that, even in this late stage of videogaming as an aftform, such a freedom as to the role you play is very limited.
The most basic choice as to the character you play is one of gender - male or female. Most of the time, this is cosmetic; bar a few personal pronouns, dialogue, plot, character abilities barely change. Alone In The Dark tried this with a little twist - the male character, tougher and better with weapons, was a PI investigating the house Decerto, wheras the female character, Emily, was a relative of Decerto's owner and so knew the house better. But I don't think the camera angles changed, which is a shame - she wouldn't be as surprised by some things as Edward (the PI) would be.
One of the earliest games, I guess, where gender made an impact was Alter Ego. This was a life-sim for the C64, where the player made personality choices for a character from the moment they're born (beginning with the marvellous line "You are in a warm, dark, friendly place.") One side of the disk contained the male version, the other the female, and each was radically different - as the development of men and women is.
It seems that in videogames, the choice of gender is often arbitrary. Black Isle Bioware's role playing games - Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout, etc, with their very open-ended structures did make some good use of gender - gender specific romances, including one for female players in Baldur's Gate II for a start, plus gender-specific conversation options. It's also worth noting that a lot of the time, the option to choose gender allows players to mirror the real world in the game world, and not to role play; surely the point of the escapist fantasy videogames provide is not to mirror the real world? Other, more interesting questions, such as player's apperance are never questioned. This is a choice that would be quite interesting in RPGs, and especially in Massively Multiplayer games, where the software company need not write routines to respond to appearance; players would go by what they'd trust in the real world. (For instance: you might choose to have a scar on your face. Will it scare people? Will it make people think you're a fearsome warrior? Will it just make you look "cool" and not effect the game world at all? I can't think of any game that models this, though perhaps some MMORPGs do, and there I can see it working).
Another common choice in gaming is the chance to name, or rename your characters. Though the hero of the Zelda games is always referred to as "Link" (and, indeed, that's the default name the game offers for him) it is possible for the player to rename the character to anything he or she chooses. It's the same with characters in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy; there are default names, but personal names can be chosen.
Why is this? Well, to go back to Alexandra's idea of "winning as a certain character", this allows me to rename Link to "Tom" and then win as me. Except I'm not me; I'm a teenage elf with pointy ears. This isn't so much roleplaying as wearing a mask. The player in the real world overlaps into the game world, and yet to what end? Not to much immersion, that's for sure. It's the character the game is designed for, but wearing my name badge.
Of course, it's difficult to design games for varyingly named characters, simply because nowadays most games feature speech and speech synthesis isn't good enough to cater for every possible name. Knights of the Old Republic caters for this by never having other characters refer to the player by name, and by never having the player speak (bar odd affirmatory "unhuh?"s during play) his/her lines; instead, the player chooses a line, which passes unspoken, and the other characters respond. This is a very successful method - if you doubt me, try playing KoTOR, because it's one of the best scripted and most immersive games I've played; it also features superb voice acting.
Alexandra raises the point of emotional immersion, and I'd argue that it's impossible to be immersed in a game if you don't care about the characters in it. In a first person game, it's easy to assume that you are the central character - but the moment you break that frame of reference (such as in the third person driving of Halo, or an external cut-scene, you have to ensure that the player still cares about their avatar; if the character looks like a dork, it's impossible to care. Half-Life went as far as to never break from the first-person perspective at all; the entire characterisation of Gordon Freeman was done by external characters' comments. At the beginning of the game, fellow scientists chat to him as a peer; later, one of them looks at the shotgun (or whatever weapon is in your hands) and says "you look like you know how to handle that thing". Voila: instant characterisation, demonstrating Gordon's development from nerdy scientist to soldier of fortune).
A common feature of games these days is having to protect other characters, or to fight alongside AI buddies. Many games successfully pull this off. Halo does it by giving the marines many, many lines of banter and dialogue; their radio chatter is so realistic (and, importantly, so is their AI behaviour) that you can't help but believe they're human and want them to stay alive. The US military commissioned the game the public will know as Full Spectrum Warrior for training purposes. A recent feature in Edge (E131) on FSW remarked:
"The army wanted to teach the players to weigh the lives of their men very heavily. Giving them voices and personalities made it hit much harder when one is killed". With modern technology and a clued-in voice director, this is an easily acheivable goal, and suitably powerful; after all, when the "man down" has a name, a personality, it's a more powerful jolt than the mere loss of firepower.
And you don't even need hyper-realistic graphics to acheive this. Sensible Software's Cannon Fodder was a very basic, cartoony sprite-based action game. Over a vareity of missions, you guide 1-4 soldiers, shooting enemy troops and completing objectives. Each of the soldiers has a name - initially, the nicknames of the Sensible stuff (for no-one can forget those first soldiers, Jools, Jops and Stu). At the end of every set of levels, 15 more recruits are added to your pool of soldiers. These are essentially the "lives" of early games. The new recruits come over a hill to join a queue of troops; not just any hill, though, but Boot Hill, with a cross or gravestone for every soldier you lost. Also at the end of the missions, all survivors are promoted a rank, and there is a rollcall of the dead. Just the simple addition of names increases the emotional connection with characters; the galling image of Boot Hill before every mission only makes the impact worse. But there's no digitised voice, no famous voice-actor or face in front of
This filling-in of personality when there is none there bar a name or briefest of animations is one way in which games could make some claim towards being something akin to an artform - the fullest understanding of characterisation is not merely in the explicit depiction the game provides, but also in the characteristics the player gives to his characters, through his/her own imagination.
Of course, games are not stories (as Greg Costikyan argues, and as I shall explore more fully later); they are as much abstract puzzles and toys as adventures. Adding characterisation to games does not always lift a game above the level of an abstract problem. The ghosts in Pac-Man, after all, had not only names (Shadow, Speedy, Bashful, and Pokey) but nicknames (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde respectively). Because the game is still entirely abstract, there is no need for anything in it to have names, and so the personification of the blob-like ghosts makes very little impact - until, of course, the player blames his own failure on the fact that "that red ghost had it in for me", and suddenly the ability to blame "Blinky" is at least some compensation. (Still, it's curious as to why they get nicknames AND names; and note that the column with the name is not titled 'Name', but 'Character').
Probably the greatest potential for character creation is in massively multiplayer games, mainly role-playing games. One of the key marketing points of such games is the ability to live a fantasy life, as an entirely player-created character, interacting with other real people (who are also living behind personas). Non-Player Characters are far less important than in traditional single player games, as players create their own dialogue, encounters, parties, and even sometimes stories. In The Sims Online, the online version of the hugely popular game, the entire game is about pretending to be another person, having another life. The Sims seems one of the strangest games to take online - for surely it would become little more than a glorified chat room, like Habbo Hotel? - and indeed, take-up figures have been far less than for games such as Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies.
Such gameds allow a greater freedom in terms of "who the player can be" and "who the player is to interact with", but of course, such greater freedoms make structured plot much harder - far more so than in relatively-free-but-slightly-limited games such as KoTOR, Deus Ex, or Fallout.
This leads into the discussion of plot within games, and of the important divide between games and stories - but that is for another essay.
Posted by tajmahal at December 4, 2003 10:45 PM