the problem of getting people to play as themselves in videogames. or why men make female characters.

everyone has noticed that when videogames give a choice of protagonists  and offer a choice of males and females a significant proportion of men will choose to be the female character. the reason always given is they prefer to look at females. the reason the cynics suggest otherwise is the implication that they are gay or somehow desire to be women.

im here to posit theres a third factor in play and it is the most important factor. that being a distancing factor. i think in action when assuming a role in a video game there is some equivlent of the unncanny valley in effect. even in a game with the best character customization where there is any attempt at realistic representational depictions of characters there will always be at the back of your mind. no matter how close the likeness is. that the character on screen isn't you and the more it looks like you tries to be you and ape your details the more it draws you out of the game.

when you see yourself beating and orc to death with a rock or running over helpless pedestrians on purpose it rings false and draws you out of the game far morel than a character that was the opposite of you in every way doing the same thing does. add to that the actual uncanny valley of poorly executer walking animations and dead eye stares where it doesn.t move or act like you on any level and the purposeful distancing of choosing a character you dont identify with at all becomes an understandable tool for immersion. its not you its this character you made up doing these actions.

two examples i'd like to consider here are the mass effect series and tomb raider. mass effect is a classic for men playing as women but another common sight with both mass effect and all games allowing facial customization to a high degree is the making of monstrously ugly men. its a tool both to allow you to distance yourself and take the game less seriously, id argue most games dont have serious intent so this is hardly detrimental to the experience (especially in wrestling games and action movie sims (mass effect 2 and saints row)) but would be something to keep in mind if one were developing a game with serious intent. with tomb raider many magazines and grrl games praised lara for reaching out to female gamers as someone who could be identified with. while this may be true its not true in the same way as you are expected to identify with a character you yourself create lara is her own defended character who is always separate from the player  this level of distance makes the game more immersive because you arnt always thinking to yourself wait a second iu didnt break my neck or launch myself 2 meters into the air to grab a ledge. in a perverse way because the action is happening to someone thats not you its more immediate because its always clear in your mind who its happening to. the sames can be said of marcus pheonix or gorden freeman who are popular characters ( or at least people enjoy playing as them) but the same would not see many characters like gorden freeman or marcus pheonix if an option were given to make a character at the start of the game. the "everyman" is a character a developer makes a game to be experienced through. a player if left to their own devices will not make an everyman.

so how can a developer make a game where the player is encouraged to build themselves with customization tools offered to them. at this point the traditional way of offering full customization of a realistic looking model for a representational game will not work because every gamer expects the issue addressed in this essay to come up. the jagged alliance 2 model of offering a personality test is also likely to fail if judging by community around that game who had instructions for how to get exactly what you wanted online very quickly. so what other options are there. the first and in some way the easiest is to go super iconic.even more iconic than the cartoony miis and avatars. basically down to the minimum amount of shapes demanded. wastleland, rogue or a bard tale. single image full body icons 16 pixels tall can be anyone. same with accii characters same with the characters in pokemon or cannon fodder. in the realm of 3d it might pay to look at the ff7 world map characters. the most honest attempt a transfusing traditional super deformed japanese rpg characters into a 3d setting even if ultimately judged aesthetically unsuccessful. part of these reason these iconic characers stand a better chance of actually being the player is their limited an abstracter movement it stops any chance of a movement uncanny valley happening ("i dont move like that")

the other obvious solution if representational or realistic graphics are needed is the first person veiw though this is also a challenge in that both how the camera moves and the limited field of vision most fpses offer cause the same kind of uncanny valley loss of immersion without the intermediary of claiming you are actually someone else. one place where intermediatearyness work and yet allow you to create yourself in game is in the case of vehicles... ive never had any problem playing myself in a jet fighter sim, a racing game or even a mech sim like armoured core.

other options include games that break the 4th wall (text based games like that old hacking sim do this best but even westward ho which had some graphical elements made this work by making the west so damn abstract and laying out its rules right up front allowed you to convince yourself that typing "bang" to shoot a bear made sense.)

the other possibility of course is putting the player in the game with technology such as the itoy or kinnect. in many ways this is the exact opposite of the approach above but breaking the 4th wall in the opposite direction. but by putting the player directly in the game rather than slapping his face on a poorly animated model it overcomes the problems of getting a player to play as themselves. you wont see many men wantng to play as women in a kinnect game.