PEEG Critique: Avataritis

The past week has seen an interesting bit of criticism in the blogosphere regarding character customization. Martyn Zachary leads the way with an intriguing discussion of why rampant character customization is not necessarily a good thing for narrative in games. Responding to the piece on his own blog Chris Lepine explores the psychological reasons why gamers are drawn to character customization. Both pieces are, unfortunately, a bit heavy on academic babble but once deciphered I think they open the door to re-thinking our obsession with custom avatars in games. I recommend reading both pieces, but you'll find a substantial summary below.

Zachary's original piece makes a compelling argument against using blank slate create-what-you-will character customizations as a narrative tool. Developers seem to think that letting players create their own protagonist will forge a greater empathetic bond, immersing them more fully in the gameworld. This only sells players short, however. Nothing about the external qualities of a protagonist - their gender, age, race, etc. - is necessary to fully humanizing them in the mind of the player. The internal facets of that character, the basic emotions and range of human experiences common to everyone, are all that need be fleshed out to create a relatable protagonist. Falling back on character customization, then, concedes that players need to be able to make a protagonist that resembles themselves or their external experiences if they are to relate to him or her and understand their motivations.

Zachary also claims that customization is a developer's answer to the rampant homogenization of protagonists, specifically the white male hero. Rather than utilize other races and genders as pre-defined protagonists many developers simply use customization in the belief that players ultimately want to see a protagonist that mirrors themselves (or an idealized version of themselves). White male protagonists were the norm before technology allowed for customization simply because that represents the largest, and therefore most profitable, player base.

Where Zachary argues that this sells gamers short - after all we can identify with a range of protagonists in other media with little trouble - Chris Lepine says that gamers in particular have developed an inability to relate to the inner lives of others unlike themselves. After a little detour into Reichean psychoanalysis he concludes that gamers have been unwilling to reveal their differences (their hobby) to outsiders in a society that often shuns gaming as an immature diversion. As a result, gamers have become insular, refusing to connect emotionally with the characters they play unless they fit a pre-defined mold they are already equipped to understand - the rugged white male protagonist. This is not necessarily a condemnation of gamer psychology - certainly not all gamers feel this way - but an explanation of why customization has become the selling point du jour. Lepine takes a different tack by claiming that modern gamers think the external background/appearance of a character doesn't represent who they fully are - it's just window dressing - but further they don't want to care. The internal lives of others, even our fictional protagonists, are off limits because our internal lives have been hidden and off limits for so long.

The difference between Zachary and Lepine's conclusions is subtle but striking. Zachary accuses developers of condescending to players in thinking they can't relate to characters radically different from themselves. Lepine, on the other hand, accuses them of thinking gamers are so stubborn and broken from years of marginalization that they won't relate to protagonists that they cannot modify into the exact image they want. Strangely, Lepine's conclusion leads to a industry-stunting spiral. Years of being marginalized as an audience have made gamers unwilling to allow the medium to change and grow in ways that would garner it more critical acceptance. Because games have been ignored as an artistic medium gamers curl into their shells and refuse to let games take them to difficult narrative places where the industry as a whole would be viewed as a more mature form of art, thus garnering the respect they desire.

Both pieces, though full enough as they are, leave open one crucial question. Why is it important for a player to relate to the inner life of the protagonist? What does a pre-defined, fully realized character offer in terms of narrative that can't be accomplished by letting the player create their own hero?

Giving the player the freedom to create their own hero means relinquishing quite a bit of authorial control. Rather than telling the story of a particular person the developer instead has to focus on crafting the story of a world, a setting in which the player generates their own story. When the player is in charge of crafting their own protagnoist, choosing their internal psychology and motivations (or choosing not to care about them at all) then the possibility of any pre-defined narrative exploration of their psychology is eliminated. The character becomes just a vessel to explore the world - the setting becomes the real protagonist.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. Many books and a handful of movie franchises have been successful on the strength of their setting rather than individual characters - the Ring of Fire and expanded universe Star Trek/Wars come to mind. But this shouldn't be the only type of narrative available to games. If we want the player to explore the inner life of a character they have to be fleshed out and meaningfully portrayed in advance, giving the player the chance to understand them from the inside and make choices based on what they believe is best for the character. It's relatively easy to decide as a player what course of action is best, particularly if your focus is on gameplay benefits rather than narrative continuity. It's easier still to make those decisions from the viewpoint of a customized avatar whose background you've decided for yourself and who, frankly, will likely be similar to yourself or archetypes you are pretty familiar with. To put yourself fully into the shoes of another, one who is fully realized with their own code of ethics and motivations, and then be tasked with deciding what to do with their life is to truly engage with with an interactive narrative. This is what I think GTA: IV tried to do. Niko Bellic is not a character whose psychology and background the player has any say in. His motivations are revealed through the course of the game but the player decides who he's going to be friends with and, in several situations, who lives and who dies. "What Would Niko Bellic Do?" is the pertinent question of the game, and a much more difficult one to answer than asking what I, the player, prefer to do or what course of action gives me the best in-game bonuses.

There's a possible literary corollary to this protagonist-as-avatar versus protagonist-as-setting distinction. All authors must make the difficult choice of whether to tell their story in the first or third person. This choice has radical repercussions on how the story is perceived and what information the reader is privy to. Most importantly, spinning a tale in the first person is generally the best choice for authors who wish to make the main character the central focus of the word. Few writers can convey the psychological complexities of a character in the third person as well as they can in the first.

First person narratives are the equivalent to games with pre-defined protagonists. Their story, their struggle, and how they interact with the world the author has constructed becomes the focus. When players are given a choice over how the protagonist behaves it should be in the service of better understanding the protagonist, not simply to find out what happen in the game world. This is the strength of first person narratives - they let us get inside the head of the protagonist with all of their biases and limitations. As players we do ourselves a disservice if we forget that and try to understand the game world from our own perspective rather than theirs.

Games without pre-defined protagonists put the emphasis on the world itself, or perhaps the characters in that world. The setting is a sandbox in which the player can test various identities for their avatar and see how the world responds to it. While the author still has quite a bit of control over how the world responds to different player types, the player interacts with the world to learn about themselves or the archetype they choose to embody rather than to learn to view the world from a different vantage point. This is a very valid way of gaming, but thus far developers haven't been explicit about these goals when creating games with player created protagonists.

The bottom line is that developers need to ask themselves what type of player is playing their game. If the player has no interest in story and only gameplay matters then no amount of backstory for the protagonist is going to draw them in - they're probably skipping the cutscenes anyway! Unfortunately the emphasis on character customization suggests that they are asking themselves this question and concluding that only gameplay matters. But of course the industry only seems to think gameplay matters because it has always been the only thing that matters, well that and flashy graphics. If we don't give players the chance to engage with deep and meaningfully different protagonists then we'll never see how important and powerful games as narrative devices can become. Unfortunately if that happens the industry has little hope of maturing into anything resembling high art.